When most people reach the age of sixty-five, and are literally crippled with arthritis, you’d expect them at least to ease off. That seems to have been the last thing that Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) was tempted to do. His output of paintings continued unabated, with many figures and nudes, and an abundance of fresh landscapes, many of them oil sketches apparently painted in front of the motif.

He wintered in Cagnes from 1905-06, and was visited there by Maurice Denis and Ker-Xavier Roussel, two former members of Les Nabis.

Renoir’s figurative work from this period has long been recognised, with paintings such as Promenade from 1906 having a distinctive softness, lightness and silken sheen. Marvellous though they are, they appear quite staid and conservative alongside his landscapes.

In Two Figures on a Path from about 1906, the figures are now staffage amid wild and wispy foliage which threatens to engulf them completely. Renoir continues to paint in thin layers, with the lightness of touch of a watercolourist.

Although he was close to the coast, and later could be driven out by his chauffeur, Renoir seems to have painted marine landscapes more seldom than in the past, for example during his visits to the north coast and Guernsey. The Port of Marseille, Fort Saint-Jean from 1906 is a marvellously loose oil sketch of crowds at the waterside and yachts, on a fine and sunny day at Marseille, just along the coast.

By 1907, Renoir had decided to settle in Cagnes, and in June bought the small estate of Les Collettes there. His first task was to get a suitable house built, and that was ready for him to occupy in November 1908.

Renoir rented a flat in the Maison de la Poste, Cagnes from April 1903 until he was able to move into his new house at Les Collettes. He painted numerous views of the building, including this oil sketch in 1906-07.

Over this period, Renoir painted three large canvases of Titianesque reclining nudes. The earlier two were modelled by Gabrielle, his wife’s cousin and their nurse/nanny, but the last, Large Nude from 1907, also known as Nude on Cushions, is different. This demonstrates well the sumptuous appearance so characteristic of his late nudes and other figurative paintings. Surprisingly, this painting wasn’t exhibited until 1913, by which time it had already been rated by critics as one of his major works.

Near Cagnes from the period 1907-19 shows a coastal bay well before this area became so heavily developed. Despite the ravages of the rheumatoid arthritis in his hands, Renoir’s brushstrokes are plentiful and vigorous.

Renoir is thought to have painted this more structured sketch of Maison de la Poste, Cagnes in about 1907, with its unusually fine strokes of contrasting colour in the foliage of the trees and shrubs.

Several of these oil sketches are just titled Landscape at Cagnes, here one from about 1907-08. Again he uses strokes of contrasting colours among the diffuse greens of the trees and meadow, with the figure of a woman wearing a broad-rimmed hat and red dress at the lower right.

In 1908, at the suggestion of Aristide Maillol and Vollard, the dealer, Renoir made two wax sculptures.

Once Renoir had moved into his new house, he started painting a series of views of The Farm at Les Collettes, Cagnes, including this from the period 1908-14. These all show the original farmhouse; he doesn’t appear to have painted the new architect-designed house in which he lived. In the foreground are some of the old trees which he had been keen to save. The family had several gardeners, but much of the land which they had bought at Les Collettes was left to grow wild. Its gardens were productive: they had their own olive oil pressed for them locally from their olive trees, for example.

I don’t know whether the Renoir family harvested their own grapes too, or whether The Vineyards at Cagnes from 1908 shows their land, or a vineyard nearby.

Medlar Trees from about 1908 shows an unusual tree, which was introduced in Roman times. Medlar fruit are a traditional dish, which are left to ‘blet’ to soften their acidic flavour before being eaten. Bletting is also accomplished by exposure to frost, making it ideal for picking in winter. The fruit became unpopular by the nineteenth century, when it had been superceded by apples and others. Renoir captures well the unusual appearance of these trees.

Few of Renoir’s drawings and preparatory sketches have survived, mostly because he discarded them, using many for lighting the stove, for instance. This fine chalk sketch was made primarily for compositional purposes, for the finished painting below. It contains just the thee nude women with Paris presenting the golden apple to the middle of the three.

For such a prolific painter of nudes, it would be easy to suspect that Renoir’s account of The Judgment of Paris, from about 1908-10, was just a platform for three voluptuous beauties. In fact, he shows here his skill as a narrative painter, in presenting a carefully composed moment of peripeteia.

After Paris has accepted Aphrodite’s bribe, of Helen (of Troy, to come), he is shown awarding her the golden apple provided by Eris (discord) from the garden of the Hesperides. Watching on is Hermes, complete with his winged helmet and sandals, and caduceus. The body language makes this a charged moment in history.

Renoir’s landscapes from the south capture the light there well, but of them Glade from about 1909 expresses the dry heat of the middle of the day, which is melting the form of these trees.

Renoir had become familiar with the old Olives of Cagnes long before he painted them here in 1909. Indeed, it was these olives which made him choose the estate at Les Collettes. He loved the rural tranquillity of Cagnes, and when it was proposed to clear the property at Les Collettes of its ancient olive trees, he bought the estate to save them.

In 1910, Renoir had a special mobile easel constructed so that he could continue to paint. He travelled to Munich with his family to paint family portraits, and whilst there took the opportunity to view paintings by Rubens on display at the Alte Pinakothek. However, by the time that he returned home to Cagnes he was unable to walk at all.

For the long summer season of the Venice Biennale, thirty-seven of Renoir’s paintings were exhibited there.

The penultimate painting which I have chosen from this period in Renoir’s career was painted a little way along the coast from Cagnes, and shows a Landscape, La Gaude (c 1910). This village is one of a small number described as ‘perched’, as its houses tumble down the hillside. Are there shades of Cézanne’s views of villages near Aix-en-Provence, perhaps?

References

Wikipedia.

My quest for symbolist artists has been turning up some strange results recently. One of these is the brilliant and once well-known Belgian painter Léon-Henri-Marie Frédéric (1856–1940). In this article and the next, I’ll tell you as much as I’ve been able to discover about him, and introduce you to a selection of his most unusual paintings.

He was born in Brussels, the son of a successful jeweller. You will find the year of his birth given in many places as 1865 rather than 1856: as far as I can ascertain this is a simple typo which has unfortunately been copied many times. As he started his artistic training in 1871, the idea that he might have been born as late as 1865 is ever so slightly incredible. But you’ll find this error repeated widely.

He was first apprenticed to an architect and decorative painter in 1871, when he also started studies at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. From 1874, he seems to have become a full-time student, working as an assistant in the professorial studio.

He must have seen his future in history painting, as he entered the contest for the Prix de Rome three times before completing his training in 1878, but was unsuccessful. Had he won the Prix de Rome, he would have been sponsored to attend the French Academy in Rome. His father agreed to fund a year in Italy instead, and when there he discovered the masterpieces of Botticelli and Ghirlandaio, which were to remain an influence over his subsequent work.

He returned from Italy in 1879, as Jules Bastien-Lepage and other Naturalists were all the rage at the Salons, including those held in Brussels. Over the following years, Frédéric seems to have followed this trend and concentrated on painting the rural poor.

Among his early works which survive is this triptych showing The Legend of Saint Francis (1882) in quite conventional and Naturalist terms. It may be that, whilst Frédéric was in Italy, he saw the cycle of twenty-eight frescoes in Assisi, which at the time were attributed to Giotto (which has subsequently been disputed). The three panels show episodes from the legend, ending at the right with the story of the wolf of Gubbio/Agubbio, which had been painted so brilliantly by the French Naturalist Luc-Oliver Merson.

That very conventional narrative painting was accompanied by his extraordinary Studio Interior (1882), which appears to be a fantasy self-portrait in which the artist is naked with a skeleton on his lap. The latter has been dressed up in undergarments with a long starry veil over them. His palette and brushes are at the lower right, and his clothes – including a top hat – are draped on chairs.

The following year, Frédéric moved to the Belgian Ardennes, from where he travelled repeatedly to Britain, Germany and the Netherlands, establishing his reputation.

This trio of paintings shows local rural Chalk Sellers (1882-83) in the morning (left), at their noon meal break, and in the evening (right). They appear to have started the day in their village, walked to the town with its factories and schools, then walked back to their homes.

Frédéric may have painted this undated Burial of a Farmer at this time, possibly to accompany the work below. Country funerals had come into a certain vogue after Gustave Courbet’s enormous success at the Salon of 1850 with his equally huge Burial at Ornans (1849-50). This is very different, showing a procession of mourners at a village funeral in the Ardennes in the winter. Leading the ranks at the left are the farmer’s widow, mother and small son, and following are other close relatives and most of the rest of the local people. The combination of mourning dress and snow make this appear almost monochrome, relieved only by three children at the right and the occasional glimpse of other garments.

This may have been followed or accompanied by Funeral Meal from 1886, in which a large group of mourners have sat down outside in the summer sunshine to remember the deceased following the funeral. Frédéric’s composition, looking down the length of the table at the level of the heads of those seated around it, brings a marvellous succession of heads and hands to the right of the painting.

In the years following the unexpected and premature death of Bastien-Lepage, Frédéric painted one of the most haunting images of rural deprivation in these Two Walloon Farm Children, from 1888. I don’t know whether this was one of his paintings exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris the following year, but he was there awarded a gold medal which sealed his success as an artist.

In 1894, Frédéric painted the four seasons, from which this represents Fall (autumn). Each is represented by a young winged child cavorting in the seasonal flora, in a rich and colourful fantasy.

Although the girls shown in Frédéric’s Three Sisters from 1896 are clean and well dressed, they are sat together peeling their staple diet of potatoes in a plain and barren farmhouse. A glimpse of the shoes of the girl at the left confirms that they are neither destitute nor affluent.

From around 1890, like some other Naturalists, Frédéric changed tack and started to paint grand fantasies with pantheistic and mystical themes, which dominated the rest of his career. I’ll look at some of those tomorrow.

Reference

Wikipedia.

In the first of these two articles, I showed how the Belgian Naturalist painter Léon Frédéric (1856–1940) had depicted rural poverty in the Ardennes, largely under the influence of Jules Bastien-Lepage. During the 1890s, he turned increasingly to very different themes, still painted in his detailed realist style.

Over those years, his paintings attracted an influential admirer, Alexandre Benois, an artist and critic who became the designer for the Ballets Russes under Sergei Diaghilev. Benois promoted Frédéric’s paintings to the Russian Princess Maria Tenisheva, who purchased some for exhibition in Saint Petersburg.

His triptych Moonlight from 1898 shows a broad panorama of the countryside at harvest time, with a full moon shining above a band of clouds. From the right, this displays each stage of the harvest, from ripe heads of grain ready for cutting, through stooks standing awaiting removal, to stubble burning in the distance, and in the middle of the centre panel the field plowed ready for the cycle to start again.

The following year, Frédéric moved to Schaerbeek in Belgium, and in 1900 he was awarded a second gold medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris.

Frédéric’s Allegory of the Night from about 1900 could perhaps be more properly titled a personification. A popular theme among those associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, his depiction is mysterious. A dark-haired figure, probably a mother, holds twin infants to her chest under the same starry veil in which the artist had dressed up the skeleton in his strange studio self-portrait from 1882.

His major work of 1900 was another and even grander triptych of The Golden Age, from which the left panel represents Morning. This is reminiscent of the floral excesses of Georges Rochegrosse‘s Knight of the Flowers from 1894, which is one of the Musée d’Orsay’s many surprises.

Frédéric has forgotten the rural poverty of his earlier years, and now shows an idyllic countryside. Young babies fly through the air, as if falling from heaven, only to latch on and feed at the breast. The men are leisurely tending to the livestock in eternal spring sunshine. There’s just one worrying figure: an old person with a stick at the left edge.

The centre panel shows Night. A small group of sheep and people, some bearing spears, are asleep in a heap in the middle of a pastoral valley in the hills. Fields behind contain dense flocks of sheep, but there are no visible landmarks to orientate the viewer in space or historical period.

The right panel shows Evening, in which women and children surround an elderly couple outside their cottage. A succession of young women are walking up to its door with large baskets of fruit on their heads. In the distance, the harvest has been cut and built into haystacks, and a horse is drawing a hay wagon up the hill at the left edge.

Another triptych from about 1905 is its urban equivalent: The Ages of the Worker. Set in the crowded streets of a Belgian town, the left panel shows men engaged in manual labour, including two who are moving heavy props from a mine. In the centre, a group of young boys are enjoying an improvised meal on the pavement as young couples and a miner move around them. At the right, women are feeding and caring for their infants. I suspect that Frédéric may have intended the work to be read from right to left, rather than in the usual and opposite direction.

Frédéric’s most ambitious painting, consisting of seven panels and eleven metres (over thirty feet) in length occupied him for the twenty-five year period from 1893-1918: All Things Die, But All Will Be Resurrected through God’s Love. This is now in the Ohara Museum of Art in Japan. I will look at it in three sections, from the left.

The three panels at the left represent Hell. A jumble of naked bodies are packed densely among rocks. In the distance long flames rise like ribbons towards the sky. Clearly a place of suffering, it unusually doesn’t follow the conventional model detailed by Dante. In the centre, a bearded head covers its eyes.

The centre panel is set high in the mountains, amid snowfields and towering rock walls. A white dove (conventionally a symbol of the Holy Spirit) has arrived bearing a sprig of oak. Underneath its spread wings is a tight cluster of naked mothers and children. Among them are two women dressed in priestly garments, one of whom is cradling a large sword. They look up to the dove, welcoming its arrival.

The three panels at the right represent Heaven, a pastoral landscape densely packed with a multitude of naked mothers and children. A similar pair of women in priestly clothing stand at the wings. The figure on the right is holding a stone tablet on which a single word appears: LEX (law), and near her children are playing with the scales of justice. Near the woman at the left two children are swinging censers which generate the smoke of burning incense.

Above them all are two concentric rainbows, and floating in the air the figure of Christ, his arms reaching out over still more figures of children, this time clothed in white robes.

After this extraordinary painting, Frédéric’s work then seems to vanish without trace, following the rise of Modernism in Europe. He wasn’t forgotten, though, and in 1929 was made a Baron and a Knight of the Order of Leopold by the king. He died at Schaarbeek in 1940.

Reference

Wikipedia.

By 1911, Renoir’s rheumatoid arthritis had literally crippled him, and he was largely confined to a wheechair. It’s sometimes claimed that in his final decade, he had his brush tied or bandaged to his hand, to enable him to paint. However, that seems to be a misinterpretation of contemporary images of the artist: his fingers were often bandaged as part of his treatment, but he used orthotics and other devices to support his use of the brush. It doesn’t appear to have deterred him from painting, nor from continuing to develop his style in increasingly radical landscapes.

That year was also a landmark in his reception: he was made an Officer of the Legion of Honour, and the first monograph about his work was published, albeit in German.

Seen in isolation, this Landscape from about 1911 could be read as a dissolution of form leading towards the abstract. But viewed in the context of his other landscapes from this period, I suggest that he was continuing to push his boundaries, and remained firmly attached to the motif. He also shows marked aerial perspective.

In 1911, Renoir and his family rented an apartment in Nice, which is presumably the location he used to paint this view of the Roofs of Old Nice (1911-1919). This shows what is now called Vieux Nice, and popular with tourists. The prominent tower is one of several in this part of the city, but doesn’t appear to the the Bell Tower of the cathedral, which is perhaps the best known.

Sadly, Renoir’s arms were increasingly affected by his arthritis, and for a period he was unable to paint at all. Unsurprisingly this made him depressed.

Renoir’s oil sketch of Le Béal from about 1912 shows at least one, I think two, women at the foot of the large tree to the right of the water. His vigorous brushstrokes contrast markedly with the landscape above, and are more reminiscent of his earlier style developed in conjunction with Alfred Sisley, way back in the early days of Impressionist landscapes.

In 1913, Richard Guino, a young pupil of Aristide Maillol, the sculptor, came to live at Les Collettes. With Renoir giving him instructions, Guino realised sculptures of some of the artist’s paintings. Five of Renoir’s paintings were exhibited at the famous Armory Show in New York, from February to March.

Orange Trees and Sea (1913) is a quick oil sketch of a view over the coast near Cagnes, I believe.

With the outbreak of war in 1914, both Pierre and Jean were called up for service, and both were wounded as a result. To add to Renoir’s domestic distress, his wife’s cousin Gabrielle, his favourite model for many years, married and moved away from Cagnes.

Renoir continued to paint a great many figurative works over this period, including this 1914 portrait of Tilla Durieux, the Austrian actress born as Ottilie Godeffroy in 1880, who died as recently as 1971. At this time, she was enjoying considerable success, having just played the role of Eliza Doolittle in a German language production of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, six months before its British premiere. She was married several times, and lived a very public life in Berlin during the 1920s. Like Rembrandt and a few other masters, Renoir captures the glistening gold in her opulent clothing.

Girl at the Foot of a Tree from about 1914 is a good demonstration of how Renoir’s soft backgrounds were losing form into more diffuse patches of colour, whilst he retains form in the figure and tree in the foreground.

The Path to Les Collettes With Lime Trees from 1914 uses a similar style, with some quite thick gestural marks in the foliage, and thoroughly vague in the distance.

The second year of the war, 1915, brought greater tragedy in Renoir’s family: Jean was wounded again, more seriously and in the leg, and the artist’s wife Aline died in late June, shortly after visiting Jean in hospital. She was only 56. His only reprieve was in having a garden studio built, making it much easier for him to paint outdoors again.

Les Collettes Farm (1915) may have been one his first paintings from his new garden studio, and shows the now familiar sight of Les Collettes.

Dominating his figurative painting were different versions of Bathers, in this case a study from about 1915. Was Renoir engaged in a final quest for the perfect motif which would somehow address his earlier failure in his Large Bathers, with its sharply classical style?

Landscape, The House Seen From the Farm is another view of Les Collettes, from 1915.

Landscape from 1915 returns to the lightness of touch of a watercolour, as in his landscapes earlier in the century.

His nudes were rearranged, this time apparently using the same model, for this study of a Bathing Group from 1916. These figures are still more strongly reminiscent of the ill-fated Large Bathers.

In 1916, Renoir must have visited Antibes, where he painted this oil sketch of its sixteenth-century Fort Carré and Antibes Lighthouse. This is not the more famous tower of Garoupe Lighthouse, which is further inland, taller and elevated, but a smaller navigational mark in the harbour, which appears almost deserted at the time.

In 1917, Renoir received an unusual honour, when The Unbrellas (1881-85) was exhibited at the National Gallery in London, as part of the Hugh Lane bequest. He was also visited by Matisse for the first time.

This Landscape from 1917 is rich in gestural brushstrokes.

Matisse visited Renoir a second time at the start of 1918, and returned frequently thereafter. Although Renoir ended his collaboration with Richard Guino in early January, by September he had invited another sculptor, Louis Morel, to work with him on terracotta bas-reliefs at Cagnes.

By 1918, the figures in Two Women in a Landscape are starting to dissolve into the vegetation around them.

Standing Woman and Seated Woman in a Landscape is among Renoir’s last paintings, probably from 1919. The woman who is standing holds a basket in her right hand; the other figure is seated on the grass, with her legs merging into its leaves.

The year 1919 started with great promise, with Renoir energetically progressing his figurative and landscape paintings. He was elevated to the rank of Commander in the Legion of Honour, and one of his paintings was exhibited next to a Veronese in the Louvre. He was wheeled around the museum in recognition.

But in November, Renoir developed pneumonia, which worsened. He died in Cagnes on 3 December 1919, and was buried next to his wife Aline in Essoyes. Of the original French Impressionists, only Claude Monet survived. It was the end of an era in European art.

References

Wikipedia.

Over the last few weeks, I have looked at a selection of the paintings of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who is famed for his portraits, nudes and other figurative works. Although I have included some of the best of those, I placed particular emphasis on his landscape paintings. Renoir is today seldom thought of as a landscape artist, but during his career he was prolific, innovative and highly influential on other Impressionists.

In this article, I look at a much smaller selection of his landscapes, and consider how they developed during his career.

Renoir had intended a traditional training in painting, and prepared for admission to the École des Beaux-Arts. He started copying in the Louvre before meeting Monet, Sisley and Bazille at Charles Gleyre’s academy, then progressed to the École in April 1862. From 1864, he exhibited at the Salon, and that summer started following in the footsteps of the Barbizon School.

He was strongly influenced by Corot, and in 1866 painted his friend Jules Le Coeur and his Dogs in the Forest of Fontainebleau. This is unusual among his works, as it was preceded by two studies, and all three were made using the palette knife rather than brushes. This makes it most likely to have been painted before Renoir abandoned the knife and returned to the brush, by the middle of May 1866.

In the summer of 1869, Renoir lived at his parents house in Louveciennes, where the Pissarros were renting a house. He visited the Monets, who were living near Bougival, and often painted alongside Claude Monet. Some of the formative moments in Impressionism if not European art occurred when Monet and Renoir visited the popular bathing houses on the Seine known as La Grenouillère, most famously seen in Monet’s painting in the National Gallery in London.

Renoir painted at least three different views of La Grenouillère that summer: that above is most similar to Monet’s, and is now in the Oskar Reinhart Collection in Switzerland. Originally conceived as plein air sketches preparatory to more finished paintings for submission to the Salon the following year, they came to define these brilliant shimmering images formed from high chroma brushstrokes as Impressionist style.

In 1873, Renoir painted in the company of Sisley during the Spring, and with Monet in the summer, evolving what was the pure Impressionist landscape. When he was painting with Monet, Renoir made this highly chromatic view of The Duck Pond at a farm near Argenteuil, another seminal work in the development of Impressionism.

During the late 1870s, Renoir moved on from this pure Impressionist style, which Sisley was to remain wedded to for the rest of his career. Renoir’s In the Woods from about 1880 is one of the most radical landscapes prior to Neo-Impressionism, which it closely resembles. Here all is light and colour, and form has dissolved into a myriad of small touches of paint.

When he visited Algeria in March and April of 1881, Renoir used this Field of Banana Trees as an opportunity to assemble brushstrokes to form its vegetation, in a manner uncannily similar to Paul Cézanne’s ‘constructive strokes’. When exhibited later in Paris, Manet himself praised this painting.

Visits to the Channel Isles of Jersey and Guernsey in the late summer of 1883 brought further change in Renoir’s style, as reflected in Sunset at Douarnenez, from around 1883, painted not far away on the north coast of France. This is a more classical Impressionist view looking directly into the setting sun.

Later that year, Monet and Renoir travelled along the French and Italian Mediterranean coast. In early 1884, on their way back to Paris, they visited Paul Cézanne in Aix-en-Provence. This marked the start of a period during which Renoir was close to Cézanne, and painted in his company, although also studying the landscapes of Corot when he was in Paris.

Renoir painted at least two versions of this view of Montagne Sainte-Victoire in about 1888-89. This is the view that became an obsession with Cézanne, here depicted in Renoir’s more conservative style. There are cotton-wool trees in the foreground, which Renoir seems to have derived from Corot. He also employs marked aerial perspective and doesn’t flatten the view. His brushstrokes are showing further signs of organisation, but they remain a far cry from Cézanne’s more radical style.

In the summer of 1892, Renoir stayed in Brittany, and apparently visited the small island of Noirmoutier, which was then joined to the north coast of the Bay of Biscay by a tidal causeway. In his painting of Bois de la Chaise (Noirmoutier) from that visit, the mimosa trees appear to melt into the warmth of the sky.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Renoir’s oil landscapes became more similar in appearance to watercolours, with the lighter touch seen in Landscape with Woman Gardening from about 1896. The crouching woman almost merges into the flowers around her, and Renoir’s brushstrokes are light and diffuse.

Throughout his career, Renoir’s landscapes were firmly rooted in the outdoors, and painting en plein air was at his core. With the progression of his rheumatoid arthritis, he became limited in the weather and seasons in which he could work outdoors, and his mobility steadily declined. Fortunately, by this time he was successful enough to be able to make provision: in 1901, he acquired a plot on which he had a studio built at his home in Essoyes.

Essoyes Landscape, Early Morning from 1901 gives a good idea of the rural tranquillity of this small town. Renoir’s trees had progressed significantly since his return to paint in the style of Corot a few years earlier. Their canopies here have a soft and sublime quality, as if melting away into the air around them.

His best solution to his health problems was to overwinter and then live for most of the year in the south of France. After renting a property in Cagnes-sur-Mer, he bought a small estate further inland in 1907.

The warmer climate of Cagnes saw Renoir painting many plein air oil sketches. The Port of Marseille, Fort Saint-Jean from 1906 is a marvellously loose oil sketch of crowds at the waterside and yachts, on a fine and sunny day at Marseille, just along the coast from Cagnes.

Once Renoir had moved into his new house, he started painting a series of views of The Farm at Les Collettes, Cagnes, including this from the period 1908-14. These all show the original farmhouse; he doesn’t appear to have painted the new architect-designed house in which he lived.

In his final years, Renoir’s landscapes continued to change. The Path to Les Collettes With Lime Trees from 1914 features some quite thick gestural marks in the foliage, and becomes thoroughly vague in the far distance.

By 1918, the year before Renoir’s death, the figures in Two Women in a Landscape are starting to dissolve into the vegetation around them.

I hope that you now agree that, no matter how good Renoir was at painting figures, he is one of the greatest of the Impressionist landscape painters. There is so much more to Renoir’s work than portraits and pink plump nudes.

One hundred years ago today, 2 December 1919, just a day before the death of Auguste Renoir, one of the great American collectors of art, Henry Clay Frick, died. Although his collection of old and modern masters didn’t open to the public until just before Christmas in 1935, Frick had assembled one of the finest private collections in the world, which is now one of the best small art museums in the world.

Frick was a controversial industrialist who was born into a family of business people in West Overton, Pennsylvania, on 19 December 1849. His grandfather had a successful whiskey distillery, but his own father didn’t prosper so well. Henry Clay Frick didn’t graduate from college either, but established the Frick Coke Company, supplying coke to steelmakers.

By 1880, Frick had bought out the partnership using loans from his friend Andrew W Mellon, another well-known industrialist, banker and philanthropist of the day. Frick also partnered with Andrew Carnegie, the steelmaker, although that was a more hostile relationship, with Carnegie constantly trying to force Frick out.

Frick was an ardent anti-unionist, and became particularly hostile during the Homestead Strike of 1892, when he ordered the construction of a large fence around a Carnegie steel mill. When striking workers surrounded the mill, Frick assembled 300 armed Pinkerton detectives to remove them. Ten people were killed, and the fight had to be broken up by 8,000 armed state militia. During this strike, an attempt was made to assassinate Frick, who was shot twice from a revolver and seriously wounded in his neck.

Frick started to collect works of art, particularly paintings, in the late nineteenth century as his wealth grew. In 1905, he moved with his business interests to New York, and much of his collection was housed in his leased Vanderbilt House at 640 Fifth Avenue. By 1914, his collection had moved into his newly completed mansion at Henry Clay Frick House, located between 70th and 71st Street and Fifth Avenue. This was transformed into a museum during the early 1930s, and was first opened to the public on 16 December 1935. It has subsequently been expanded twice, in 1977 and 2011.

The Frick Collection is surprisingly eclectic, with an unusually good group of works by Fragonard, as well as some important works by great masters. It includes no less than three paintings by Vermeer, and landscapes by Constable, Turner and Corot. I show here a few of the Frick’s paintings which I love most.

Jan van Eyck’s Virgin and Child, with Saints and Donor (c 1441-43) is one of the canonical works of the Northern Renaissance.

Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait from 1658 is one of the best of his unique series of self-portraits, showing the artist in his old age.

Jan Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl from about 1657 is one of the finest of his surviving works.

Jan Vermeer’s Mistress and Maid from 1667 is rather different from the artist’s more usual compositions. This was the last painting bought by Frick before his death.

Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of Elizabeth, Countess of Warwick from about 1780, shown above and in the detail below, has remarkably loose brushwork in her hat and its extraordinary ribbons and feathers.

Francisco Goya’s The Forge from 1817 is a superb depiction of the physically demanding work of the blacksmith.

JMW Turner’s superb oil painting of The Harbour of Dieppe made in about 1826 is one of his best later topographic paintings, and one of relatively few of the artist’s paintings outside Britain.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Mother and Children from 1875–76 is one of the artist’s major figurative paintings from the height of Impressionism.

Finally, Whistler’s Harmony in Pink and Grey: Portrait of Lady Meux from 1881-2 is one of his key paintings.

The Frick Collection website is here.

One hundred years ago today – on 3 December 1919 – Pierre-Auguste Renoir died in Cagnes, on the Mediterranean coast of France, at the age of 78. Over the last two months, I have been looking at a small selection of his paintings, with particular emphasis on his landscapes, rather than the portraits, nudes and other figurative works for which he is best known. In this last article in my series about him, I will look at some of his most famous paintings.

Renoir started his painting career working not on canvas but on porcelain, in a factory. He eventually trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and at Charles Gleyre’s private academy, where he met and became close friends with Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille and Claude Monet.

During the 1860s, he shared a studio in Paris with Bazille. In November 1867, Renoir painted Frédéric Bazille Painting at his Easel. He is working on his still life of a dead heron, and in the background is one of Monet’s wintry landscapes. Bazille was another of the very promising figurative painters among the French Impressionists, who was tragically killed in combat during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.

Before that war, Renoir often painted in company with Claude Monet. During the summer of 1869, the two of them visited the popular bathing houses on the River Seine known as La Grenouillère, where they painted a group of what were intended to be plein air sketches in preparation for more finished works, to be submitted to the Salon the following year.

Renoir painted at least three different oil sketches of La Grenouillère that summer: that above, which is most similar to Monet’s famous painting now in the National Gallery in London, is in the Oskar Reinhart Collection in Switzerland. These brilliant shimmering images formed from high chroma brushstrokes established Impressionist style, so successfully that the more finished versions were never even started.

Although Renoir was an avid landscape painter throughout his career, from its earliest years it was figurative painting for which he was best known. During the late Spring of 1876, Renoir set himself the task of painting a large group of people at one of the popular dances at the nearby Moulin de la Galette. He working conventionally, making various studies and sketches near his new rented house and studio in Montmartre.

It’s thought that the final step in his preparations was to paint a sketch in front of the motif, which is now held in a private collection. Back in his studio he then worked that up during May into this larger version, one of his – and Impressionism’s – masterpieces, Bal du moulin de la Galette (Dance at the Moulin de la Galette) (1876). This was exhibited at the Third Impressionist Exhibition, and has become one of the canonical European paintings of the late nineteenth century.

In contrast to his many single-sitting landscape sketches, Renoir’s best known large figurative paintings are often the product of long preparations. During the summer of 1880, Renoir started work on another of his masterpieces, which he didn’t complete until the following year: Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880-81), another complex group of figures.

This was set on the Île de Chatou at the Restaurant Fournaise, and funded by commissioned portraits over that period. Among his models were his partner and later wife Aline Charigot (left foreground, with affenpinscher dog), the actress Jeanne Samary (upper right), and fellow artist Gustave Caillebotte (seated, lower right). This work was exhibited at the Seventh Impressionist Exhibition in 1882, where it was praised by several critics.

Renoir has started his career, like most of the French Impressionists, so poor that he was sometimes unable to buy food or paint. His success as a portraitist and better acceptance of his figurative paintings brought him an earlier and more substantial income, enabling him to travel to Algeria and Italy in 1881-82. He managed to introduce himself to the composer Richard Wagner, whose portrait he painted in just over half an hour, in Sicily. Renoir studied the Old Masters in Italy, which were a major influence in the development of his style.

Renoir started work on The Large Bathers in 1884, but didn’t complete it until 1887. It was intended to be the first of a new style of figurative paintings which he had devised from his studies of the work of Ingres, Raphael, Rubens and Titian, in particular. Its figures appear to be sculpted, and it is thought that at least one sculpture, a lead relief by Girardon, was an influence on them. It features two of his favourite models: his partner Aline Charigot, who is the seated blonde, and the painter Suzanne Valadon.

Sadly, this painting was savaged by the critics, and Renoir was forced to abandon this new style, although some of its features remained in his subsequent figurative paintings.

Over the same period, about 1881-86, Renoir worked on The Umbrellas, which was more conventionally Impressionist, and much better received. This canvas is packed not only with people, but their umbrellas too. In parts they are so crushed together that the taller pedestrians are raising them high, to avoid bumping into others. Together they form a dark blue-grey band between the people below and the grey sky above. Analysis of the paint layer has revealed how methodical Renoir was: in the first stage here, he used cobalt blue, then switched to extensive use of synthetic ultramarine for its second stage.

Renoir had developed a good friendship with Berthe Morisot and Her Daughter, Julie Manet, seen here in his double portrait from 1894. Morisot suffered chronic ill health from the time of the Franco-Prussian War. When Renoir painted her here she was only 53. When she died on 2 March the following year (1895), Renoir returned from wintering in Provence to attend her funeral in Paris. Julie’s father Eugène (brother of the painter Édouard Manet) had died three years earlier, leaving her orphaned at the age of sixteen.

By the time that Renoir painted this haunting Self-portrait in 1899, when he turned fifty-eight, his own health was starting to deteriorate. He had been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in the early 1890s, and its progression changed the later years of his career. Fortunately by this stage he was able to afford the support necessary to enable him to continue painting. Indeed, if anything his limited mobility drove him to be even more productive.

After long series of treatments in healing spas around France, Renoir moved to the south coast of France, initially wintering there and spending the summer in the family house in Essoyes, his wife’s home town. Over this period, Renoir painted three large canvases of Titianesque reclining nudes. The earlier two were modelled by Gabrielle, his wife’s cousin and their nurse/nanny, but the last, Large Nude from 1907, also known as Nude on Cushions, is different. This demonstrates well the sumptuous appearance so characteristic of his late nudes and other figurative paintings.

Renoir continued to paint many figurative works during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Among them is his 1914 portrait of Tilla Durieux, the Austrian actress born as Ottilie Godeffroy in 1880. At this time, she was enjoying considerable success, having just played the role of Eliza Doolittle in a German language production of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, six months before its British premiere. Like Rembrandt and a few other masters, Renoir’s gestural marks of bright colour capture so well the glistening gold in her opulent clothing.

In 1919, Renoir had been wheeled around the rooms full of paintings in the Louvre, celebrating one of his paintings which had been hung next to a Veronese there. In November, though, he fell ill with pneumonia, and died at Cagnes on 3 December 1919.

Renoir was one of the few painters of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who excelled across all genres. His landscapes start with the Barbizon School and end well into the innovations of modernism. His nudes develop from the great tradition of Titian, and his more complex figurative works are masterful. He was, and remains, one of the greatest European painters of that period.

Previous articles in this series:

1: 1860-67
2: 1868-75
3: 1876-80
4: 1881-85
5: 1886-90
6: 1891-95
7: 1896-1900
8: 1901-1905
9: 1906-1910
10: 1911-1919
Auguste Renoir as landscape painter

I’d like to express my particular appreciation of the largest collection of Renoir’s paintings, the Barnes Foundation, in Philadelphia, PA, which has 181 in total, among them many landscapes which might otherwise have been dispersed across private collections and become inaccessible.

Agramante’s massed Saracen forces have launched their attack on the besieged city of Paris. Although reinforcements led by Rinaldo have so far been successful in defending the city from outside, the African King Rodomonte has penetrated the citadel and is wreaking havoc within. Charlemagne himself has taken a team of his best knights to tackle Rodomonte, who is now battering the door of the palace, threatening to massacre its occupants. Eight knights try to stop this assault.

At this point, Ariosto turns to consider Grifone’s adventures in the city of Damascus. He has gone there in an attempt to win his treacherous love Orrigille back from the clutches of her latest paramour Martano. Damascus is a city of great opulence one week’s travel from Jerusalem. As part of its current festivities, a jousting contest is to be held this day. Grifone bathes and hears of this unexpected contest, which is repeated each month at the behest of King Norandino, whose story is then told.

The king had long been fond of the daughter of the King of Cyprus, and was at last able to marry her on that island. As the couple and their courtiers travelled back by sea, their ship hit a storm which drove them ashore, where they erected as much shelter as they could. The king went off in search of game for them to eat, but failed to return. Instead they saw a gigantic monster, a land orc which seemed to be hunting its quarry by their scent as it was almost blind. When it discovered the ship’s company, they scattered, some swimming back to the ship, others caught by the orc and put aside ready for its next meal.

The orc had two caves, one close to the sea where an old woman kept a group of women of all ages; the other, high on a rock above, it used to keep a mixed flock of sheep and goats. The orc much preferred to eat humans, though, and quickly started devouring members of the ship’s company alive.

Norandino returned from his hunting to find their camp deserted. A boat was sent from their ship to rescue him, but when he heard of the orc he decided to stay and hunt it, as it had captured his bride Lucina. He tracked the monster down to its sea cave, where the old woman warned him to escape while he could. The king confirmed that his wife was still alive, and being a woman would never be devoured by the orc, who only ate men, at a rate of four to siz each day.

Norandino enlisted the help of the old woman, and smeared himself with the grease from the carcass of a goat, to confuse the orc’s sense of smell. The woman then draped his stinking body with a rotting goatskin, and waited for the orc to return late in the evening, after it had been tending to the flock. When it reappeared, the orc let the king into its cave along with the rest of the flock, then devoured two of the men there for tea. Once the orc had left, Norandino was reunited with his bride, which she found very distressing, knowing that he too would soon be eaten.

The king had another plan, and got all those present to cover themselves first with foul-smelling grease from slaughtering some of the flock, then to don their skins and wait for release in the morning, with the rest of the animals.

At first light, the orc returned and released its flock and the disguised people, except for Lucina, who for some reason it stopped and pushed back inside the cave before securing its entrance.

When the orc went back to the cave that evening, it realised the other humans had escaped, and in revenge chained Lucina to a rock. Day after day the king kept her company, unable to free her.

One day, two knights, Mandricardo and Gradasso, passed by and through good fortune freed Lucina. Norandino didn’t hear of this until later, by which time everyone else had gone. He made his own escape, and after arriving in Syria, started to look for his bride. He eventually heard that she was safe on Cyprus, and they were soon reunited. He therefore instituted a monthly celebration, and the following day will be four months since the king’s reunion with his queen.

That night, Grifone joins in the feast, and the following day dresses up in his finest armour ready to joust. The prize for the winner is a complete outfit of weapons and a surcoat adorned with precious stones; the weapons had been found by a merchant, whose tale will be told later.

When Grifone arrives in the town square, where the joust is being held, it has just started. One of his opponents is Martano, who had eloped with Orrigille and is brimming with confidence until they see one of the knights die after being pierced through the head. Grifone pushes Martano out to fight, though. As soon as Martano is in combat, his cowardice is obvious, and he runs off through the spectators, who burst into laughter.

Grifone is deeply embarrassed at this display of cowardice, and steps into the fight. He quickly makes amends for Martano, dismounting his first opponent with his lance, and the second with blows from his sword. Those two down, Grifone continues his success against five more champions, each biting the dust after the other.

It is only when Grifone faces the Baron of Seleuca that his success is slowed. Grifone gets the better of the first pass, and blows from their lances. When they duel with swords, Grifone retains the advantage, but doesn’t lay his opponent down as quickly. Seeing his victory drawing near, Norandino gives the sign for them to stop, leaving Grifone the supreme champion.

Grifone then makes his way back to his lodging, still ashamed at Martano’s cowardice. He decides to take the couple away from the city that day, using a secret path to avoid any further embarrassment. They stop at the first inn which they come to, Grifone’s horse is unsaddled, and he undresses and falls asleep naked on his bed.

While Grifone sleeps, Martano takes the knight’s horse, clothes and armour, pretending that it is he who was the champion of the joust, so that he can claim the prize. He reaches the town square by dusk, just as the king calls out for the winner to be found and awarded his due. Martano then passes himself off to King Norandino, who affords him honour and respect. He and Orrigille are accommodated in luxury.

Grifone doesn’t wake until evening, when he discovers Martano’s deceit, and blames himself for letting it happen. An hour before sunset, Grifone rides back into town dressed as Martano. As he enters, he sees where all the nobility are feasting with the imposter. They spot Grifone dressed as the coward who fled from the joust, and jeer at him. Martano tells the king a pack of lies about coming across the knight on his journey, which are only confirmed by Orrigille.

Norandino decides to punish the cowardly knight by sending his men to wait for him in ambush as he rides out of town. Grifone is then held prisoner until the next day. Martano, fearing that Grifone might tell the king the truth, then leaves the city hurriedly, as further honours are bestowed on him by the king.

The following day, Grifone is dragged without his armour to the town square, where he is put on a cart for all to mock. He is then toured around the streets to ensure that everyone recognises the coward that he is. As soon as they release his hands and feet, he seizes his sword, which had been trailing round behind the cart in the dust. With that, Ariosto closes Canto seventeen.

You will, I am sure, have recognised the long story of Norandino, Lucina and the land orc as a retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Odysseus and Polyphemus, from Book 9 of Homer’s Odyssey.

Polyphemus, the cyclops, has only one eye, and is a cannibal. When he makes Odysseus and his crew captive and starts eating them, Odysseus gets the giant drunk, drives a wooden stake into his one eye to blind him, and he and his crew tie themselves to the undersides of Polyphemus’ flock of sheep in order to escape.

This was also retold by Euripides in his play Cyclops, again in Virgil’s Aeneid, and by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. It appears to have been drawn from a far older story which has been found across many of the folk tales in Europe, the Middle East and Russia.

Principal Characters

Agramante, King of Africa, who is leading the war against Charlemagne in revenge for the killing of his father, Troiano. Non-Christian.

Charlemagne, Charles the Great, Christian King of France and Emperor.

Gradasso, King of Sericana, an ‘oriental’ and non-Christian.

Grifone, son of Oliver, a Christian knight.

Lucina, daughter of the King of Cyprus, who marries Norandino.

Mandricardo, King of Tartary and son of Agricane, an ‘oriental’ pagan knight.

Martano, the lover of Orrigille, and elopes with her to Antioch.

Norandino, the King of Damascus, who marries Lucina.

Orrigille, loved by Grifone, the treacherous lover of Martano, with whom she elopes to Antioch.

Rinaldo, cousin of Orlando, one of Charlemagne’s paladins and bravest knights, and commander-in-chief of the Scottish and English forces who come to Charlemagne’s aid.

Rodomonte, the African King of Sarza and Algiers, the son of Ulieno.

The artists

Daniel Berger (1744-1825) was a German engraver who was sufficiently eminent to be appointed professor of the Prussian Academy of Arts.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Having produced large sets of illustrations for classics such as Dante’s Divine Comedy earlier in his career, he started work on a set for Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in the late 1870s, for publication in 1879. These are the last major illustrations which he made. This article looks at his paintings.

Giovanni Lanfranco (1582–1647) was an Italian painter who was a contemporary of Rubens. He was apprenticed to the Carraccis, whose workshop in Rome he continued to work in after their deaths. He became the leading painter for Pope Paul V, then working mainly in fresco, although he also made many easel paintings. His masterpiece is the fresco of the Assumption of the Virgin in the dome of Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome.

References

Wikipedia on Ariosto
Wikipedia on Orlando Furioso

Barbara Reynolds (translator) (1975, 1977) Orlando Furioso, parts 1 and 2, Penguin. ISBNs 978 0 140 44311 0, 978 0 140 44310 3. Verse translation with extensive introduction and notes.
Guido Waldman (translator) (1974) Orlando Furioso, Oxford World’s Classics. ISBN 978 0 19 954038 9. Prose translation.

I don’t usually celebrate the anniversaries of individual paintings, but this year there’s one which merits it, as it was responsible for changing the course of painting during the nineteenth century. It was also painted by an artist whose other works are largely forgotten. This revolutionary painting is Théodore Géricault’s massive Raft of the Medusa, completed and exhibited in 1819.

This first article of two considers history painting before this work, the underlying story, and how Géricault painted what he did. Tomorrow’s sequel will explain its reception and effect on art.

The idea of painting historical events goes back to the dawn of painting, but such works were only seldom intended to be any form of visual record of what actually happened. Renaissance battle scenes, for example, were composed as works of art, and the artist was rarely an eye witness, or undertook research to establish what the scene might have looked like. Even gross anachronisms, such as the use of cannons before gunpowder had been introduced to Europe, were acceptable.

West and modern history

One of the first painters to consciously make an effort at fidelity was Benjamin West (1738–1820), who ended up in a row with the influential Joshua Reynolds over how he should paint contemporary history.

West intended to paint a scene from an almost uniquely brief battle between British and French forces on 13 September 1759, which lasted just an hour or so. At the end of their three months seige of the French city of Quebec, Canada, British forces under the command of General Wolfe were preparing to take the city by force. The French attacked the British line on a plateau just outside the city.

Within minutes, General Wolfe suffered three gunshot wounds, and died quickly from them. The French commander, General Louis-Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm, was also hit by a musket ball, and died the following morning. The British line held, and the French were forced to evacuate the city, which ultimately led to France ceding most of its possessions in North America to Britain, in the Treaty of Paris of 1763. Wolfe’s death was quickly seen as the ultimate sacrifice of a commander in securing victory.

West’s painting uses a formal composition in three groups, arranged in a line across the foreground, with the dying general at their centre. The central group has common compositional features with scenes painted of the crucifixion of Christ, and is often considered to be modelled after a ‘Lamentation’ or pietà, although there are obvious differences in the people present (the Marys are central), their positions (there are commonly figures at the foot, and cradling the upper body), and most significantly in the fact that, at that stage, Christ’s body is limp and lifeless.

The argument centred on West’s choice of a subject from very recent history, and his claim that he was put under pressure by Joshua Reynolds to dress its figures in classical Roman clothing. In Galt’s biography of West, he gives these words as being West’s own:
“When it was understood that I intended to paint the characters as they had actually appeared in the scene, the Archbishop of York called on Reynolds and asked his opinion, the result of which was that they came together to my house.”
West is reported as saying that Reynolds “concluded with urging me earnestly to adopt the classic costume of antiquity, as much more becoming the inherent greatness of my subject than the modern garb of war.”

Of course West didn’t actually attempt to produce a visually accurate record, but an image which was an artistic interpretation of a real event. The next step towards modern history painting was taken by Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), in his account of Marat Assassinated from 1793.

David as eye witness

Marat was a leading member of the Revolutionary movement in France, an influential journalist through his newspaper, and a friend of David, who had become embroiled in Revolutionary politics. Because of a severe skin disease, Marat spent much of the time in a bath to ease the intense itching. On the morning of 13 July 1793, Charlotte Corday, a young woman from Normandy, turned up at Marat’s house in Paris, asking to see him; his fiancée turned her away. She gained entry that evening, and started to give Marat the names of some local counter-revolutionaries. While he was writing them down, she drew a kitchen knife with a 15 cm (6 inch) blade from her clothing, and plunged it into Marat’s chest, killing him very quickly.

Corday admitted if not boasted of her actions, and on 17 July she was executed in public by guillotine. Marat became a martyr for the cause, after his friend David had organised his spectacular funeral, and an enduring painted memorial.

David shows Marat’s body slumped over the side of his bath, the murder weapon and his quill both on the floor, the pen still in his right hand, and a handwritten note in his left hand. Corday’s note gives the date, and addresses itself from her to Citizen Marat. It opens with “It suffices to say that I am very unhappy to qualify for your kindness”.

This sparse and simple painting became the quintessential image of The Terror in particular, and the Revolution as a whole. Although still a combination of artistic interpretation, reality as seen this time by an eye witness, and more than a little political propaganda, it appears to have a documentary quality: a painting as a visual record of contemporary history.

Shipwreck

In 1816, France was a nation in turmoil. Crushed militarily at the Battle of Waterloo the previous year, Napoleon’s empire had collapsed, and the rest of Europe had restored the rule of Louis XVIII, reverted the country’s boundaries to those of 1789, and were occupying the country until it paid a war indemnity.

In June 1816, the French Naval frigate Méduse (Medusa) sailed as the lead of a small group to accept the return of French Senegal from the British, as part of the peace process. She was under the command of Viscount de Chaumereys, who had had little experience at sea over the previous twenty years, but had been preferred as a result of political policy.

The Méduse overtook the other ships instead of sailing in company, and the captain’s poor navigation took it more than a hundred miles off course, to run aground on a sandbank off the coast of West Africa on 2 July. The decision to abandon the vessel was taken on 5 July, but with four hundred souls on board and capacity for only around 250 in the ship’s boats, at least 146 men and one woman were put on board a raft which was built hastily for the purpose.

Although the ship’s boats had originally intended to tow the overloaded and partially-submerged raft, it was cut loose after only a few miles. The survivors on the raft then had little to keep them alive: a bag of ship’s biscuits which were eaten on the first day, two barrels of water which were soon lost overboard, and six of wine, hardly suitable to prevent dehydration. Over the following thirteen days, most died or were killed, leaving just fifteen alive when they were spotted by the Argus, a brig from the same group bound for Senegal.

Some of the survivors wrote a detailed account which was published in 1817, and deepened the embarrassment caused to the newly-restored French monarchy. What should have been a routine step in restoring a French colony became a lasting matter of shame in the press, and public debate.

Research

In the winter of 1817-18, when Géricault must have decided to paint this disaster, he would have recognised the two changes of fortune (moments of peripeteia) in the story: the abandonment of the Méduse, and the rescue of the few survivors remaining in the raft. Classically, the best depictions of shipwreck and rescue have chosen the latter as preferable, as it shows both the result of the gruelling period of survival and the imminent hope of being saved. Géricault may also have considered this a parallel with that moment in the history of his nation.

During the spring and summer of 1818, Géricault worked on accumulating the information which he needed for the painting. He spent a long time talking to survivors, notably Savigny and Corréard, the principal authors of the book about the incident, and studied popular lithographs which were being produced illustrating it. Of the three example illustrations included in Eitner’s monograph about this painting, one showed the abandonment, one a mutiny on board the raft, and the last the sighting of the rescue ship.

He sketched various moments during the disaster, gradually honing in on the moment of rescue. This drawing shows one of the ship’s boats from the Argus reaching the raft, for example, and Géricault drew each event from the mutiny through to the raft being left empty once everyone had been rescued. Note that in this sketch, the raft is shown as a long rectangle rather than a square.

Once he had selected the second moment of peripeteia, when the survivors first sighted the Argus, he then worked through different compositional options, resulting in an initial compositional study in oils.

He continued to develop from this, probably completing these preparations during the autumn of 1818.

Attention to detail

In this period of almost a year devoted to preparatory work, Géricault accumulated a great deal of information about the disaster. He had enlisted the help of another of the survivors, a carpenter, in constructing props for his studio painting. As figures resolved for inclusion in the work, he made detailed studies of those elements in readiness for painting.

This study shows one of the figures, known as “the Father”, from the group named “the Father holding his dead son”, seen below in the finished painting.

Géricault visited morgues to make studies of cadavers and body parts. When he came to paint individual figures, he carefully selected some of sickly appearance, including the young artist Eugène Delacroix, who was ill with jaundice at the time.

In contrast to his previous studies, though, for the finished work he decided to make the Argus so tiny that this most important element in the whole composition was also its smallest.

The finished work

The end result is a vast canvas, its figures shown life-sized, which has had huge impact on everyone who has seen it since 1819. It appears completely authentic, and given the work that Géricault put into making it so, that’s perhaps not surprising. But most gain the impression that the raft was almost square in form, as a result of the tight cropping applied, and that even with those few survivors on board, it was overcrowded. This is because Géricault chose to pack all his figures into one small section of the raft.

References

Shipwrecked art history: Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa

Athanassoglou-Kallmyer N (2010) Théodore Géricault, Phaidon Press. ISBN 978 0 7148 4400 8.
Eitner L (1972) Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, Phaidon Press.

In the first of these two articles, I explained how Théodore Géricault (1791–1824) came to paint his vast canvas of The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19). Here I describe its reception, and the effect that it had on painting in the nineteenth century.

Géricault’s huge canvas was hung at the Salon in Paris in 1819, originally under the title of Shipwreck Scene (Scène de Naufrage). Those who saw it there would have had no difficulty in recognising its reference to the Medusa incident. The critics were, as expected, divided, some writing complaints about its frank depiction of corpses and the feelings of revulsion they evoked. Among the public, the painting was the most discussed of the year, and shot to stardom immediately.

The painting was awarded a gold medal, but surprisingly wasn’t purchased for the nation. At the end of the Salon, it was removed from its stretchers, rolled up, and put into storage. The artist himself retreated to the countryside to recover.

The following year, Géricault took it to London, where it went on display in a private gallery in Piccadilly, and was seen by about forty thousand viewers during the latter half of the year. There it was better positioned than it had been at the Salon, and more generally acclaimed by critics and public alike. In 1821, it moved on to Dublin, where it competed less successfully against the spectacle of a moving panorama on the same tragedy.

The Raft of the Medusa wasn’t purchased by the Louvre until after Géricault’s early death in 1824. A smaller copy was made in the late 1820s and exhibited to crowds in Boston, Philadelphia, New York and Washington DC.

Critics also raised concerns about the accuracy of Géricault’s depiction of the raft and its occupants.

The published drawing of the plan of the raft reveals how the painting shows only about a quarter of the total area of the raft as it actually was: the lowest rectangular section drawn in Savigny and Corréard’s book.

Another problem was the physical state of the bodies, alive and dead, which hardly reflects thirteen days of almost complete starvation and profound dehydration. Instead, Géricault opted for a well-muscled appearance more typical of life classes or classical sculpture. He may have done that in order to increase the heroic impression, rather than making the survivors look weak and pathetic.

Géricault’s subsequent career was tragically non-descript. He retreated to painting what he liked best – horses, as in this view of The Epsom Derby from 1821. He also developed an interest in Lord Byron’s poem Mazeppa, which had coincidentally been published in 1819. Much of this poem details the suffering and endurance of a future leader of the Ukraine during a long journey tied naked on the back of a horse, as punishment for his affair with a Polish Countess.

Among the first artists to paint Mazeppa was the ailing Théodore Géricault, here in his first study from about 1820. The wild horse carrying Byron’s long-suffering hero has just swum across a river at night, and is now climbing up the bank. The viewer is almost guaranteed to wince in sympathy with the Cossack’s cold and pain.

In what must have been one of his last paintings, Géricault revisited Mazeppa in 1823, the year before his death, which occurred partly as the result of the cumulative effects of injuries from his horseriding, and from tuberculosis. In his final months, he was working fitfully on early studies for large works showing the slave trade, and the Spanish Inquisition.

In depicting ordinary people struggling to survive in extraordinary circumstances, Géricault opened the way for successors including Eugène Delacroix (who had modelled for the painting) and, most of all, Gustave Courbet.

Courbet’s monumental A Burial at Ornans (1849-50) shows in remarkably unemotional and objective terms the funeral of the artist’s great uncle in the small provincial town of Ornans. The event had taken place in September 1848, but the painting gives the impression that it is a faithful and contemporary record.

Courbet actually painted the work entirely in the studio, using those who were present as models. It shows a moment which could only have existed in the artist’s memory: like the Raft of the Medusa, it doesn’t necessarily represent an image which ever existed in reality. But it has been carefully researched, imagined, composed, and painted to give the impression of accuracy and objectivity, rather than being another Romantic fantasy.

That in turn brought social realism, as in many paintings of both rural and urban deprivation during the latter decades of the nineteenth century.

A fine example is Léon Lhermitte’s masterpiece The Harvesters’ Pay from 1882, which looks objectively at the economic and social aspects of the harvest. Four of the harvesters, bearing their heavy-duty scythes, await payment by the farmer’s factor, who holds a bag of coins for the purpose.

In the centre of the painting, one of the workers is counting out his pay in front of his wife, who is feeding a young infant at her breast. To their left, another worker just sits and stares blankly into the distance, dead-beat tired and wondering whether his pittance was worth all that effort. Once again, these are ordinary people apparently seen in a faithful image of reality.

That became one of the cornerstones of Naturalism, which moved on to show apparently real images of science, technology and, above all, medicine.

In André Brouillet’s A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière Hospital (1887), the eminent neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot is demonstrating how he could hypnotise Marie “Blanche” Wittman, the ‘Queen of Hysterics’, into suffering a hysterical collapse. Charcot and Wittman were a renowned partnership in this ‘act’, who performed in front of Sigmund Freud when he visited the hospital.

Although Naturalism fell from grace by the start of the twentieth century, Géricault’s ghost continues to haunt images such as Tom Lea’s startling 2000 Yard Stare, showing the human effects of the Second World War in the Pacific.

Few paintings still reverberate through art history in the way that The Raft of the Medusa does, two centuries after they were first exhibited.

References

Shipwrecked art history: Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa

Athanassoglou-Kallmyer N (2010) Théodore Géricault, Phaidon Press. ISBN 978 0 7148 4400 8.
Eitner L (1972) Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, Phaidon Press.

We’ve had an exceptionally wet autumn here in the south of England, and our local footpaths and bridleways are now deep tracts of mud, impassable in anything but high boots. For much of European history, most winters have been the same, only when there were few paved roads, most of the population squelched, slipped and cursed their way through that mud.

Except in paintings they didn’t, at least not until relatively recently. This and tomorrow’s articles try to discover what wet winter conditions were really like in paintings.

I’ve spent long hours working through paintings made before 1800 in the couple of thousand articles I’ve published here, and across Wikimedia Commons collections. Although plenty of landscape, genre and other paintings show winter conditions, before 1800 few if any have depicted people, vehicles or animals in mud of any visible depth. Indeed, in most cases even their feet or footwear have magically remained essentially clean.

Neither do many painters show scenes of the common European weather which brings seemingly inexhaustible mud: rain. Roads are dusty and dry in the summer, or covered in deep snow for troikas to slide over in the winter, but never just deep mud. Not until the nineteenth century.

In the early nineteenth century, streets in major cities in Europe including Paris spent much of the winter as muddy morasses. Enterprising poorer inhabitants took long planked constructions to locations where the more affluent would try to cross the rivers of mud, and hired them out to enable the rich to stay cleaner.

This is shown well in Louis-Léopold Boilly’s Passer Payez, or Pay to Pass, from about 1803, where a whole family is taking advantage of one of these crossings. This spared their footwear and clothing gaining a coating of mud. As you can see, their shoes, lower legs and clothing are amazingly clean, as if they might actually have been painted in Boilly’s studio rather than the muddy streets of Paris.

As realism and real-world scenes became more popular in the middle of the century, Adolph von Menzel showed a more accurate view of the problem of muddy roads in his Hussars Rescue a Polish Family from 1850. It was clearly a wet autumn, with the leaves still burning red and gold on the trees in the background. These mounted soldiers are helping the elderly women from a carriage across the muddy ruts of the road. The hussar in the foreground, with his back to the viewer, even has mud on his riding boots.

One of the first artists to have used mud in a more meaningful way is Jean-Léon Gérôme, in his 1868 painting of The Death of Marshal Ney. Michel Ney (1769-1815) was a leading military commander during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and was made a Marshal of France by Napoleon. Following Napoleon’s defeat and exile in the summer of 1815, Ney was arrested, and tried for treason by the Chamber of Peers. He was found guilty, and executed by firing squad near the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris on 7 December 1815.

Gérôme shows Ney’s body abandoned after the execution, slumped face down and lifeless in the mud, his top hat apart at the right edge of the canvas. The firing squad is being marched off, to the left and into the distance. The mud only reinforces Gérôme’s powerful image of a cold, bleak, heartless execution.

Mud also has its recreational uses, as children of all eras will attest. Ludwig Knaus’s painting of Mud Pies from 1873 shows a group of children in the evening, near Dusseldorf, Germany, who are enjoying play in and with the mud, which is perhaps less fun for the swineherd behind them.

While other Impressionists had been exploring the effects of transient light on the River Thames, in 1875, Giuseppe De Nittis examined the city’s muddy and rutted streets, in his painting of The Victoria Embankment, London. This wasn’t one of the older roads in the city either: the Victoria Embankment wasn’t constructed until 1865, and had only opened to traffic five years before De Nittis painted it.

Muddy roads in northern British cities like Leeds were one of the favourite settings for the nocturnes of John Atkinson Grimshaw. At The Park Gate from 1878 (above) and November from 1879 (below) are glistening examples.

Mud became a frequent effect in the Naturalist paintings made so popular in France by Jules Bastien-Lepage.

Pas Mèche (Nothing Doing) (1882) shows a cheeky ploughboy equipped with his whip and horn, on his way out to work in the fields. His face is grubby, his clothing frayed, patched, and dirty, and his boots caked in mud.

Bastien-Lepage’s brilliant but equally ill-fated protégé Marie Bashkirtseff painted a muddy track in one of the parks beside the River Seine in Paris, during the wet Autumn of 1883.

But for real mud, deep enough for wheels and legs to sink in and cake clothing, I turn to central and eastern Europe.

Jakub Schikaneder’s The Sad Way from 1886 shows a single rather weary horse towing a cart on which a coffin rests. The woman, presumably widowed before her time, stares emptily at the rutted mud track, as a man walks beside them. It’s late autumn in a world which is barren, bleak, muddy and forlorn.

Józef Marian Chełmoński’s undated Market is one of the most vivid insights into country life in Poland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To reach this street market, carts are being drawn through a deep ditch, which is full of muddy water. Market stalls are mounted on tables set in the mud, which forms the basis for everything, as if it were elemental.

Also undated is contemporary and fellow Polish artist Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski’s Meeting the Train. A couple of horse-drawn carts have gone to a rural railway station to meet a train. The winter snow still covers much of the ground, except where it has been turned into rutted mud on the road.

Tomorrow I will follow this trail of mud through the salons of a French château, up into the Nordic countries, and off to the War to End All Wars.

In yesterday’s article, I showed the rise of mud in paintings during the middle and late nineteenth century, ending with a couple of filthy road scenes from the winter in Poland.

Mud plays a significant role in this unusual modernised religious story by Fritz von Uhde, A Difficult Journey from 1890. This imagines Joseph and the pregnant Mary walking on a rough muddy track to Bethlehem, in a wintry European village. Joseph has a carpenter’s saw on his back as the tired couple move on through the dank mist.

Although the Franco-Prussian War started in the summer of 1870, its later stages, including much of the fighting around Paris and its siege took place in the late autumn and winter, when mud was at its height (or depth).

Anton von Werner’s In the Troops’ Quarters Outside Paris, from 1894, shows muddy soldiers in the luxurious Château de Brunoy, which had been abandoned to or requisitioned by occupying forces. Every boot seen is caked in mud, which covers the trouser legs of the orderly who is tending to the fire.

Artists in the Nordic countries were also starting to depict mud more realistically in their paintings.

Laurits Andersen Ring’s Father Coming Home from 1896 shows a mother and two children awaiting the return of their husband and father. He is still quite distant along the muddy track in this poor rural community in Denmark.

Further north in the valleys of Norway, Nikolai Astrup painted Farmstead in Jølster in 1902. Two women, sheltering from the rain under black umbrellas, are walking up a muddy path which threads its way through the wooden farm buildings, guiding a young girl with them. Astrup delights in the colourful patches which make up each of the turf roofs, and the contrasting puddles on the grass. His unusual aerial view might prevent us from seeing the mud covering the hems of their coats and dresses, but we know that it’s there.

A few years later, Ring painted Short Stay (1909), showing an elderly man and woman standing in the mud in silence and facing in opposite directions. He’s towing a small sledge on which there is a sack; she’s carrying a basket in which there is a large fresh fish wrapped in paper (I think).

Ring’s friend Hans Andersen Brendekilde painted this Village Scene in the Early Spring in 1911. The rutted mud track is slowly drying from its winter role as main drain. A man is out cleaning the tiny windows of his cottage, and two women have stopped to talk in the distance. Smoke curls idly up from a chimney, and leafless pollards stand and wait for the season to progress.

Three years later, this muddy peace was shattered when Europe went to war, digging trenches across huge swathes of the muddy fields of northern France and Belgium.

An official war artist, CRW Nevinson’s Paths of Glory was exhibited with a quotation from Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written In A Country Church-Yard (1750):
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Like Marshall Ney, the bodies in Nevinson’s famous depiction of the aftermath of the destruction of war lie face down in the mud. Here isn’t dust to dust, or ashes to ashes, but mud to mud. Rifles, helmets, the bodies themselves are being engulfed in all-enveloping mud.

Other artists who went to the front recorded different aspects of its mud. François Flameng’s view of an Attack (1918) being made on duckboards over flooded marshland, brings home a clear picture of what actually happened over and in the deadly mud. His war paintings, many of which were not published until the end of the war, were criticised for being too real.

This scene of devastation at The Cliff of Craonne (1918) shows part of the battlefield of the Aisne in 1917 which gave rise to one of the famous anti-military songs of the Great War, La Chanson de Craonne. It is a landscape in which only the mud has escaped destruction.

Typical of the paintings which Paul Nash made of the Western Front is his watercolour Wire (1918). It shows a characteristically deserted and devastated landscape, the mud pockmarked with shell-holes and festooned with wire fencing and barbed wire. Its only landmarks are the shattered stumps of what was once pleasant pastoral land.

Nash’s The Menin Road (1919) was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee in April 1918 for its Hall of Remembrance, for which John Singer Sargent’s Gassed was also intended. It shows a section of the Ypres Salient known as Tower Hamlets, after what is now a part of eastern London. This area was destroyed, reduced to barren mud, during the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge.

The history of mud in European painting is curiously brief. Perhaps this is because it was one of those embarrassing everyday irritations which artists came to ignore until it became important to the reading of their paintings. Maybe if we retained the association between the mud of Nash’s Menin Road and the apocalyptic destruction of war, we might show greater respect for peace. And for the great changes in society which now make mud a much lesser part of our lives.

Towards the end of each year, I take a look at a selection of paintings which were completed a century ago. In this article, I start by showing some of the narrative paintings which were completed in 1919.

That year was something of a turning point in history. The Great War of 1914-18 had been followed by an influenza pandemic, the ‘Spanish Flu’, whose spread was accelerated by the movement of people in the aftermath of war. By 1919, the population had fallen by some 17.5 million due to the war, and another 50 million due to the pandemic. Large areas of the north of France and Belgium had been razed to the ground, and many communities there vanished and never recovered.

Art was as badly affected as anything else in life. Last year, I reported some of the painters who succumbed to the pandemic, in particular, including Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt. The rise of modernism was eclipsing many long-popular artists, as movements like Cubism and Expressionism came, overwhelmed, and vanished as the next -ism arrived.

One genre which is still generally considered to have entered terminal decline in the late nineteenth century, but which continued into 1919, is narrative painting, including history, and some genre and religious works which referred to stories.

Pierre Bonnard painted the classical myth of The Abduction of Europa in 1919. This is one of Bonnard’s rare mythological works, showing Europa being carried away to Cyprus by Jupiter, who has disguised himself as a white bull to entice her to get on his back. The story is drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and has been painted by almost every major figurative painter.

Bonnard’s bull is dipping his back as the naked Europa sits on him. In the far distance, coloured red in the setting sun, is the island of Cyprus, their next destination. Bonnard’s coast is very Mediterranean, with a deep blue sea and intense colours: a traditional story and composition, painted in very modern style.

Lovis Corinth painted narrative works throughout his career, and his Magdalen with Pearls in her Hair from 1919 is one of his few works in the UK (in the Tate Gallery). This is one of several paintings that he made of Mary Magdalen, a popular subject for religious paintings. He follows the established tradition of showing Mary as something of a composite, based mainly on Mary of Magdala who was cleansed by Christ, witnessed the Crucifixion, and was the first to see him resurrected. Apocryphal traditions held that she was a reformed prostitute, and most depictions of Mary tread a fine line between the fleshly and the spiritual.

This is Corinth’s most intense and dramatic depiction of Mary, her age getting the better of her body, and her eyes puffy from weeping. She is shown with a skull to symbolise mortality, and with pearls in her hair to suggest the contradiction of her infamous past and as a halo for her later devotion to Christ.

John Riley Wilmer’s Piccarda (1919) is more traditional in all respects, including his style. Its story is more of a puzzle, though: the only well-known character of that name is Piccarda Donati, the subject of Dante’s first encounter when he visits Paradise, in the poet’s Divine Comedy. That Piccarda was a devout nun, who was forcibly removed from her convent for an arranged marriage, and died soon after her wedding. I am at a loss to explain this painting in terms of that story, which may thus exemplify the pursuit of novel readings of traditional stories.

More modern stories, such as that of Salome and the execution of John the Baptist, remained popular following their introduction in the late nineteenth century. More explicit images of this newly-invented femme fatale include Bela Čikoš Sesija’s Salome from 1919, who stands on tiptoe to peer at the saint’s severed head.

This period saw further advances in the role of women in society, with women at long last being given voting rights in Britain and Germany in 1918, Austria and the Netherlands in 1919, and the USA in 1920. In 1919, one of the last of those involved with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, compiled and illustrated the Golden Book of Famous Women, an anthology of writings about famous women by well-known authors. This starts with Helen of Troy and Cleopatra, and ends with fictional characters of Dickens and George Eliot. I have chosen three of her sixteen paintings as examples.

St. Catherine of Siena (1919) shows the Dominican philosopher and theologian, who lived from 1347-1380, apparently debating with cardinals above the city of Rome.

In Joan of Arc Praying (1919), Joan is shown as a poor peasant girl, praying among the sheep grazing in the countryside.

The legendary Guinevere was also featured, although I suspect that her adulterous relationship with Lancelot wasn’t examined in much detail.

‘Problem pictures’, in which the viewer is given clues to an unresolved and previously unknown narrative, had become enormously popular with the public at the end of the nineteenth century, and in some parts of the west lasted well into the twentieth century.

One of its greatest British exponents, John Collier, tried unsuccessfully to revive problem pictures after the war, with works such as Sacred and Profane Love (1919), which returned to the popular theme of women’s problems. On the left, sacred love is shown as a modestly if not dowdily dressed plain young woman, and on the right, profane love as a ‘flapper’ with bright, low-cut dress revealing her ankles, flourishing a feather in her left hand. The suitor is shown reflected in the mirror above, a smart young army officer.

There were also some paintings showing the future of narrative works, including Joseph Stella’s extraordinary Tree of My Life.

This large fantasy is almost Surrealist, although the term had only just been coined by Guillaume Apollinaire two years previously, and isn’t generally recognised until the 1920s. Stella here seems to have been influenced by the equally extraordinary paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. His canvas is filled with exotic plants and birds, with densely-patterned passages, as shown in the detail below. These are presumably autobiographical references, in a work which the artist described as the “tree of my hopes.” In 1919, there were a lot of hopes too.

This painting was sold at auction a year ago for nearly $6 million.

Relatively few of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s drawings have survived, as he treated them as scrap paper, using what would now be precious artworks to light his stove. One of his few finished oil paintings for which there are still studies and derivatives is his narrative work showing the Judgement of Paris, completed in about 1908-10, although there seems greater uncertainty over its date.

The mythical scene which he depicts is part of a long interlinked story which stretches from the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, the parents of Achilles, to the destruction of the city of Troy. According to some ancient sources, the wedding was celebrated with a great feast on Mount Pelion, attended by most of the gods. The happy couple were given many gifts by the gods, but one, Eris the goddess of discord, had not been invited. As an act of spite at her exclusion, she threw a golden apple ‘of discord’ into the middle of the goddesses, to be given as a reward to ‘the fairest’.

This is Jacob Jordaens’ The Golden Apple of Discord from 1633, based on a brilliant oil sketch by Rubens. The facially discordant Eris, seen in midair behind the deities, has just made her gift of the golden apple, which is at the centre of the grasping hands, above the table.

At the left, Minerva (Pallas Athene) reaches forward for it. In front of her, Venus, her son Cupid at her knee, points to herself as the goddess most deserving of the apple. On the other side of the table, Juno reaches her hand out for it too. This sets up the beauty contest at the heart of this section of the story, between the goddesses Hera (Juno), Athena (Minerva or Pallas Athene) and Aphrodite (Venus).

Zeus wisely declined the invitation to judge which of the three was the fairest, eventually passing that onerous task to Paris, prince of Troy, and a mortal, who had a recent track record of making good judgements. Being goddesses, the three couldn’t play fair, and each tried to bribe Paris to award them the golden apple.

Paris held his judgement on Mount Ida, where the three goddesses were accompanied by Hermes (Mercury) as their guide. Paris first inspected them clothed; as he was unable to make a decision, the three of them removed their clothing and offered Paris their bribes. Hera offered to make him king of both Europe and Asia, and Athena plied him with wisdom and skill at war. But it was Aphrodite’s inducement to which Paris succumbed: she offered him the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen, then the wife of the Greek king Menelaus.

The consequence of Paris’s (ill) judgement was that he abducted Helen and took her to Troy, which was the immediate cause of the Greek war against Troy. And the rest is legendary history, culminating in Aeneas founding the precursor of Rome.

The Judgement of Paris was a very popular theme for paintings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of my favourite accounts is this relatively late work by Peter Paul Rubens, who made several versions during his career. This dates from 1632-35, and is one of the finest paintings in London’s National Gallery. The three goddesses are, from the left, Athena with her shield, Aphrodite, and Hera with her peacock. Paris is just about to give Aphrodite the golden apple of discord, as Hermes leans on the tree behind.

The story remained quite popular with artists into the nineteenth century, when its depiction started to stray from convention, as shown in this version by the great narrative painter Jean-Baptiste Regnault in 1820. However, the same attributes such as Hera’s peacock are still present.

Before Paul Cézanne became an Impressionist in the 1870s, he painted several dark canvases with his palette knife, in his ‘dark period’ of couillarde (‘ballsy’) works. In 1862-64, he painted this mature approach to this story. Paris, seated at the right, appears to be handing the golden apple to Aphrodite, second from left, while Hera modestly keeps her back turned towards him, and Athena is trying to seduce him and take the apple. It seems unlikely that Renoir saw this painting, though.

Renoir seems to have started to sketch ideas for his version of the story soon after he moved into his new house in Cagnes. Unfortunately, the sequence of his sketches isn’t clear, and what has been proposed doesn’t synchronise with proposed dates for his finished painting.

This undated study, apparently made in pen and ink, starts to develop his composition, with the three goddesses and Paris seated in front of them.

This fine chalk sketch thought to be from about 1908 appears to have been made primarily for compositional purposes, and contains the same four figures.

This chalk sketch adds the figure of Hermes, and puts the other figures into positions even closer to those of Renoir’s finished painting. However, this drawing is claimed to date from 1915.

This is Renoir’s finished painting, with its three slightly soft-focus nudes against a background of rather blurry countryside. Paris has accepted Aphrodite’s bribe, and is here awarding her the golden apple provided by Eris from the garden of the Hesperides. Watching on is Hermes, complete with his winged helmet and sandals, and caduceus.

This detail shows the goddesses’ softly textured flesh, and the lack of crisp edges which is distinctive of Renoir’s style at the time.

When Renoir was living in Cagnes, he was a close friend of the sculptor Aristide Maillol, who encouraged the painter to develop sculptures based on his paintings, and introduced Renoir to Richard Guino, a young Catalan artist who then worked with Renoir to create derivative 3D works of art. By this time, Renoir’s rheumatoid arthritis was so severe that he was confined to a wheelchair much of the time, and there was no way that he would have been able to make any sculptures himself. Instead, Renoir directed Guino’s hands to shape the clay and other materials.

This bas relief, I think created in clay, was formed by the young sculptor under the direction of Renoir, to metamorphose his 2D painting of the Judgement of Paris into 3D.

That was apparently cast in bronze (I believe) to create this relief. Renoir had no need for a 3D printer.

Ariosto is infuriatingly adept at juggling with the multiple narrative threads in Orlando Furioso: as we start Canto 18, Orlando himself, and Angelica, are fading from memory, and the siege of Paris is at a critical moment as Charlemagne’s eight knights try to stop Rodomonte from battering his way into the palace. But we’re about to discover what became of the knight Grifone, who has been cheated out of recognition as the victor of a jousting contest by his cowardly rival Martano, who had eloped with Grifone’s treacherous lover Orrigille to Antioch.

Martano had stolen Grifone’s clothes, armour and horse and pretended to be the victor of the tournament, leaving Grifone condemned as the coward who ran away from his joust, as Martano had done. The following morning, Grifone was paraded through the city of Damascus in shame, until he finally managed to retrieve a sword that had been trailed through the dust behind the cart on which he had been carried.

Grifone is armed again, and still under attack by a group of townspeople. He quickly kills thirty of them, leaving the rest to scatter. The city’s gate is closed by pulling its drawbridge up, in a bid to keep Grifone outside the walls. Those inside call for help to defend the city from the knight’s revenge.

At this point, Ariosto quickly switches back to his account of the siege of Paris, where Charlemagne has led eight Christian knights to tackle Rodomonte, who is intent on battering down the door to the palace so he can slaughter its occupants and wage his one-man war of terror in the heart of the city.

When the eight knights charge at Rodomonte with their lances, he leaps up uninjured. Two more join the group trying to destroy him, but his armour made from dragon skin is proving perfect protection, and he beheads one of his attackers, Hugh of Dordogne. The whole population of the city is summoned to converge on the wild Saracen, to the point where the streets are packed with armed men. He then tries to fight his way through the crowd, killing many in his bid to escape.

He carves his murderous way to the river, where he enters the water in full armour, and swims across to the opposite shore. Once there he looks back at the citadel, still standing undamaged despite his destructive efforts, and for a moment he thinks of storming it again, before walking away.

Dame Discord then sows enmity among Agramante’s leaders, accompanied by Pride and Jealousy. These three meet a dwarf sent out by Doralice, and set out to make trouble between Mandricardo and Rodomonte, who asks the dwarf how his beloved Doralice is. The dwarf tells Rodomonte how Mandricardo had killed the lady’s escorts and abducted Doralice. Rodomonte is furious, and, demanding to be taken to the lady, he rushes off in haste.

Rodomonte’s departure from the siege enables Charlemagne to stand his defences down, and for Rinaldo’s forces to engage the Saracens again. Whilst they are so engaged, Charlemagne is planning to attack his enemy’s rear. After fierce fighting, the Christians put the African forces to rout.

Meanwhile, back in Damascus, Norandino has brought a thousand men to deal with Grifone, who has found some discarded armour to wear and now stands in control of a bridge beside a temple. When the king’s men reach the road below him, Grifone drops down to halt their advance. He repeats this, building a large pile of bodies as a result.

Grifone fights on, collecting a series of wounds but not letting them diminish his valour. The king is impressed by this, and realises that this is no coward. The knight fights on like Horatius defending his bridge in Rome, so the king admits his error of judgement and offers up to half his kingdom in recognition of his mistake. Norandino summons his doctor to attend to Grifone’s wounds, and has him taken back to his palace to recover. It takes a full week before Grifone is able to don his armour again.

While Grifone has been away, his brother Aquilante and Astolfo have been looking for him throughout Palestine. They had discovered from a Greek traveller that Grifone had learned that Orrigille had gone to Antioch, and were sure that was where the brother had gone. Aquilante then travelled by ship to find his brother, leaving Astolfo awaiting his return.

Aquilante sailed from Jaffa, and completed the journey overland to Antioch, where he heard that Orrigille had gone with Martano to Damascus. As Aquilante presses on in pursuit of his brother, he comes across the couple, the imposter Martano still wearing Grifone’s clothes and armour. Aquilante sees Martano for the liar that he is, and demands to know where he got his clothes and armour. Hearing this, Orrigille tries to flee, but is blocked by Aquilante.

Martano is terrified when the knight puts his sword to his throat and threatens to behead them both. The coward then tries to lie his way out of the situation, claiming that he had rescued his ‘sister’ from the clutches of Grifone. Aquilante already knew that Orrigille wasn’t his sister, and had earned the reputation of being promiscuous, so saw straight through those lies.

Instead of killing them there and then, Aquilante knocks two of Martano’s teeth out, trusses them up and makes them walk alongside his horse to Damascus, where he intends handing them over to his brother. This ensures that the two villains are exposed for what they are in every village on the way there.

When Aquilante reaches the city, he is welcomed by the king, and his prisoners are thrown into the dungeon. The two brothers meet, Grifone still recuperating from his wounds, and they agree they must devise an appropriate punishment for Martano and Orrigille. Following discussions with the king, they decide that Martano is to be flogged, and Orrigille will be sentenced by Queen Lucina when she returns.

Norandino reinstates Grifone in public, then announces a tournament in his honour. News of that reaches Astolfo, who travels from Jerusalem with Sansonetto to join them. During their journey, they meet a fine knight, who turns out to be the lady Marfisa, someone brave and valiant enough to give Orlando and Rinaldo a run for their money. Astolfo and Marfisa already knew one another, and when he tells her that he is heading to a tournament, Marfisa decides to join them.

The morning after they arrive in Damascus, the tournament begins. King Norandino hopes and expects Grifone to win again, so puts up a mace, sword and horse as the prize. He has them hung together with the weapons which Martano had cheated from them in the first tournament. When she sees them on display, Marfisa recognises them as her own, which she had abandoned some time ago in order to pursue a thief on foot.

Marfisa goes up to take her armour back, but the king sees her and an angry mob quickly gathers. She delights in combat, so rides her horse at the threatening mob, killing a few of them with her lance before finishing others off with her sword. Seeing this, Astolfo and Sansonetto go to her aid. The other knights waiting for the start of the jousting quickly join in, turning the occasion into a violent affray. Grifone and Aquilante join in too, only to be unseated in disgrace from their mounts by Astolfo’s lance.

One by one the knights disperse, most leaving the city. But the brothers Grifone and Aquilante, having lost their honour, decide to pursue Marfisa, Astolfo and Sansonetto as they try to move off. Grifone then recognises Astolfo, and asks who his companions are. Eventually, all are recognised, including the fearsome Marfisa, who explains to King Norandino that she is the owner of the armour. Honour is reconciled, allowing Marfisa to reclaim her arms and armour at last.

The king starts the tournament, which is won by Sansonetto, who manages to beat them all, even Marfisa. Just over a week later, all five including Marfisa depart for France, to join the forces there. They first travel overland to Tripoli, where they board a cargo ship, which also accommodates their horses. They stop first at Paphos on the island of Cyprus, where they hear the story of Lucina again.

They return to their ship and set sail again, running straight into a severe storm with thunder and lightning. The following day the storm worsens, so the captain heaves to and lets their ship drift, waiting for the weather to improve.

Back outside the besieged city of Paris, Rinaldo goes into combat against Prince Dardinello, whose emblem he must challenge for reasons of chivalry. The prince rushes at Rinaldo with his sword and lands the first blow, which makes Rinaldo laugh, charge at Dardinello, and run his body through with his sword, killing him instantly. Their leader dead, the Africans quickly disperse, leaving the English to finish off those who are slow to flee.

Elsewhere the Moors are in trouble too, and retreat to cut their losses. King Agramante is dismayed, but relieved that at least some of his troops remain secure. When night falls, only a third of his men remain, and rivers of blood flow through fields. Charlemagne spends the night outside the city, planning a dawn attack as the weeping and groaning of injured and defeated Saracens can be heard in the distance.

Two of the Moors there, Medoro and Cloridano, had been deeply loyal to the dead Prince Dardinello. When on guard, Medoro proposes to his friend that they should search for the prince among the dead to give him an honourable burial, or die in the process of trying. When relieved of their guard, they cross no-man’s land on their mission. Passing sleeping Christians, they take the opportunity to stealthily kill some on their way.

Eventually they come upon the field of corpses among which they believe the prince’s body to be. Medoro then prays to the moon for them to be shown their leader’s body. At that moment, the moonlight shines bright between the clouds, lighting up the city before them, and putting a spotlight on the body of Dardinello. The two then bear him back through the darkness. But by this time the first light of dawn has arrived, and Prince Zerbino, leader of the Scots, is already awake. Cloridano decides to abandon the body there and then, but Medoro takes the weight and hurries on faster, until they both enter an old wood.

Principal Characters

Agramante, King of Africa, who is leading the war against Charlemagne in revenge for the killing of his father, Troiano. Non-Christian.

Aquilante, son of Oliver, a Christian knight, and brother of Grifone.

Charlemagne, Charles the Great, Christian King of France and Emperor.

Cloridano, one of Prince Dardinello’s Moorish soldiers, a ‘pagan’.

Dardinello, son of King Almonte and cousin of King Agramante, a ‘pagan’ prince.

Gradasso, King of Sericana, an ‘oriental’ and non-Christian.

Grifone, son of Oliver, a Christian knight, and brother of Aquilante.

Lucina, daughter of the King of Cyprus, who marries Norandino.

Mandricardo, King of Tartary and son of Agricane, an ‘oriental’ pagan knight.

Marfisa, Ruggiero’s sister, a valiant and fearsome ‘pagan’ warrior.

Martano, the lover of Orrigille, and elopes with her to Antioch.

Medoro, one of Prince Dardinello’s Moorish soldiers, a ‘pagan’.

Norandino, the King of Damascus, who marries Lucina.

Orrigille, loved by Grifone, the treacherous lover of Martano, with whom she elopes to Antioch.

Rinaldo, cousin of Orlando, one of Charlemagne’s paladins and bravest knights, and commander-in-chief of the Scottish and English forces who come to Charlemagne’s aid.

Rodomonte, the African King of Sarza and Algiers, the son of Ulieno.

Sansonetto, envoy to Jerusalem, son of the King of Persia, who was baptised by Orlando.

Zerbino, son of the King of Scotland and the leader of the Scottish forces.

The artists

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Having produced large sets of illustrations for classics such as Dante’s Divine Comedy earlier in his career, he started work on a set for Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in the late 1870s, for publication in 1879. These are the last major illustrations which he made. This article looks at his paintings.

Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1794-1872) was a German painter who trained at the Vienna Academy, from where he went to Rome in 1815 to join the Nazarene movement there, with Johann Friedrich Overbeck and others. He was involved in the campaign to re-introduce traditional fresco painting, and in 1822 was commissioned to paint frescoes depicting Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in the entrance hall to the Villa Massimo in Rome. He completed these by 1827, when he returned to Munich to paint frescoes for the new palace there showing scenes from the Nibelungenlied. He later turned to Biblical illustrations and designs for stained glass windows.

References

Wikipedia on Ariosto
Wikipedia on Orlando Furioso

Barbara Reynolds (translator) (1975, 1977) Orlando Furioso, parts 1 and 2, Penguin. ISBNs 978 0 140 44311 0, 978 0 140 44310 3. Verse translation with extensive introduction and notes.
Guido Waldman (translator) (1974) Orlando Furioso, Oxford World’s Classics. ISBN 978 0 19 954038 9. Prose translation.

It’s not very often that you come across an artist from the island of Mauritius, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and I think it’s fair to say that the French-Mauritian painter Henri Le Sidaner (1862–1939) is the most famous painter from there. His family were French, and lived in Port Louis until he was about eight, when they returned to France, settling in the Channel port of Dunkirk.

Le Sidaner went to train at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he was a pupil of Alexandre Cabanel. However, the student found himself wrestling with irreconcilable differences with his teacher, and left.

In 1885, Le Sidaner went to live in the art colony at Étaples, to the south-west of his home town, and still on the coast. Although now largely forgotten, at the time it was at its peak, with artists like Daubigny and Eugène Boudin painting in the area. His realist painting of St. Michael’s Church in Étaples from about 1885 shows his conservative style at the time.

While he was in Étaples, Le Sidaner developed a particular interest in atmospheric light effects, which was to dominate his paintings for most of his life. His childhood friend Eugène Chigot (1860-1923) joined him there, and shared this interest.

Le Sidaner also painted themes which are unusual, and increasingly disquieting. He painted the Walk of the Orphans, Berck in 1888, just along the coast at the resort of Berck. The girls and young women dressed in grey are orphans being cared for by the nuns and one ‘civilian’ wearing blue, at a local charitable institution. This was a similar theme to Joaquín Sorolla’s later Sad Inheritance (1899), although in that case the children had obvious disabilities.

Here there is the feeling of quiet serenity as these girls and women wander among the sand dunes.

Le Sidaner’s style has also evolved to the more Post-Impressionist, his figures being formed from a fusion of small marks, with an overall granularity.

In 1894, Le Sidaner left the Étaples art colony, and started travelling more widely. His Sunday from 1898 has moved on too, still populated by young women, but now standing in the twilight sunshine above a town set astride a river. This is more overtly Symbolist, with an increasingly Divisionist facture.

The Quay, from the same year, appears to have been painted on one of the urban canals in Belgium or the Netherlands, which were to dominate his paintings over the next few years. From the lights in the windows, this is set at twilight too, and is eerily quiet and deserted. His palette is both limited and muted to match the lighting. His style has changed to that of a soft realism.

The following year, Le Sidaner was in Belgium during the winter, where he painted this Canal in Bruges, Winter (1899). His palette is even more restricted, almost to the point of becoming monochrome, but a mixture of brushmarks are now apparent on the water and edges of the canal. The few figures in the distance are inconspicuous and do little to temper its eeriness.

Another year later, and his Barge on the Canal (Morning) (1900) is essentially monochrome, its elements being distinguished primarily by their different lightness. The water surface is barely visible, the whole painting being dominated by the dawn lighting.

In the early years of the twentieth century, colour reappeared in his paintings such as this Canal in Delft from 1905, which has a rich range of greens, yellows and reds marking the autumn. He has also developed his distinctive facture of many small marks fused together, and swirling through the golden leaves. This is still twilight, though, with lights apparent in some windows, and eerily deserted.

Although Le Sidaner seems to have painted mostly twilight rather than true nocturnes, his Gaslight, Blue Night (original French title Le Bec de Gaz – Nuit bleue) from 1906 is an exception which appears to have been painted in Venice.

Le Sidaner appears to have been successful with these works, exhibiting at the Salon in Paris, and with dealers Georges Petit and Goupil. He settled in the old village of Gerberoy, inland in rural north-east France, which appears repeatedly in his later paintings, as I’ll show in the next and concluding article.

By the early twentieth century, as I showed in my first article, the French-Mauritian painter Henri Le Sidaner (1862–1939) had developed a particular interest in lighting effects of twilight, expressed in paintings with his distinctive facture of fused fine marks.

Le Sidaner clearly developed a reputation, although perhaps this wasn’t quite what he had aimed for. Marcel Proust mentions him in the fourth volume of his series In Search of Lost Time, where the artist is described as being “highly distinguished” but “not great”. French novellists have a track record of trashing contemporary painters, though, as Émile Zola did of Paul Cézanne.

Le Sidaner visited Britain on several occasions, and in 1906-07 painted this view of St. Paul’s from the River: Morning Sun in Winter, which may have been inspired by Monet’s series paintings of Rouen Cathedral, although here expressed using Le Sidaner’s distinctive marks.

Roses and Wisteria on the House from 1907 is one of the artist’s favourite twilight scenes, here showing the front of his house in the old village of Gerberoy.

During another visit to Britain in 1908, Le Sidaner visited the sixteenth century royal palace at Hampton Court, upriver of the Thames from the city of London, which he painted as Autumn at Hampton Court. This is perhaps his most Impressionist work, with its much wider range of different marks and the rich colours of dawn or dusk.

In about 1910, Le Sidaner followed in the brushstrokes of the Divisionists in his Fog in the Midi.

For this ghostly nocturne of the River in the Moonlight, Quimperlé, from about 1910, Le Sidaner visited this town in Brittany, in the far north-west of France. The perspective projection is unusual in giving the impression that the river is flowing down quite a steep gradient, and as usual its streets are deserted.

At about this time, Le Sidaner started to paint deserted tables in carefully composed views.

The Table, Spring from 1913 is an early example, with a range of drinks laid out for one person in the foreground of a gently rolling country landscape in Spring. Leafy branches provide formally symmetric repoussoir.

His Autumn Table, painted some time in the decade 1910-20, is laid out for two, with a fruit bowl to suit the season as well as drinks, and the façade of a large house, perhaps the artist’s, behind. The leaves have already turned to gold on the creeper covering the wall of the house.

He continued to paint his established views, including this richly Golden Morning from 1920.

Like several other artists in the early twentieth century, Le Sidaner visited the Mediterranean coast of France. When there in 1920, he took the opportunity to paint this view of Table of the Sea, Villefranche-sur-Mer. This table is laid for one, and beyond its balcony is a small bay. His marks are coarser here, some consisting of quite thick daubs of paint, suggesting that this was more of a sketch than most of his other tables.

For his Small Table at Dusk from 1921, Le Sidaner visited the Petits Fossés at Nemours, not far from the city of Paris, on the River Loing, near where Alfred Sisley had painted many landscapes about forty years earlier. This table is laid for two, each with a bottle of beer. The overall effect is reminiscent of his earlier paintings of canals, with chairs that could have been taken from one of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings of his room in Arles.

White Garden at Dusk from 1924 looks like a corner of the artist’s garden in the old village of Gerberoy.

In 1928, Le Sidaner painted this view of a steep alley in Church Road, Villefranche-sur-Mer. Judging by the angles of the shadows here, this is one his relatively few paintings in which the sun is high in the sky. There are even a few people ascending this hill towards the church.

In his later years, Le Sidaner seems to have abandoned his career-long fascination with twilight, and his distinctive facture, to paint a more conventional view of his home in White House, Gerberoy from 1934.

Henri Le Sidaner died in the summer of 1939, just short of his seventy-seventh birthday. A couple of months later, Germany invaded Poland and the world was again at war.

Banquets and feasts are a popular theme for paintings, as they have been in photography. This weekend I’m going to look at selections of paintings of the other two universal mealtimes, breakfast and lunch, including those breakfasts which are sufficiently leisurely as to merge into lunchtime. Although most of these paintings are from the nineteenth century and later, I’ll include some significant works from earlier.

I start with one of the strangest breakfasts of all: the third of Botticelli’s magnificent paintings of The Story of Nastagio Degli Onesti from 1482-83. This depicts the breakfast scene in this gruesome story from Boccaccio’s Decameron. I have written a fuller account of this story, together with images of the whole series of paintings, in this article.

This is a full-on breakfast banquet attended by members of two noble families of Ravenna, Italy. In the midst of this al fresco meal, the naked ghost of a dead woman appears, being chased by the ghost of a man on horseback. She is then attacked by ghostly dogs and murdered by the man – all in front of the guests as they’re tucking into the meal. Nastagio’s love is sitting at the table on the left, from which all the women are rising in distress at the sight, spilling their food in front of them.

By the late nineteenth century, breakfasts had become rather more orderly and far less shocking. Just a year before his untimely death in 1884, the Italian peri-Impressionist Giuseppe De Nittis painted this startling Breakfast in the Garden, with its contrast between the detail of the glass soda syphon, covered bowl, glasses, and other reflective materials on the table, and its wonderfully sketchy garden background.

I don’t know if the Swedish painter Hanna Hirsch (Pauli) saw that painting, but a few years later she used an outdoor table for her virtuoso painting of Breakfast-Time (1887). This strikes a wonderful balance between the painterliness of the ground and wooden furniture, and sufficient detail (below) to bring the silverware, porcelain and abundant glassware to life. She was only 23 when she completed this.

Another Impressionist, this time the American William Merritt Chase, caught his young family at their Open Air Breakfast in about 1888. They are seen in the backyard of Chase’s parents’ house in Marcy Avenue, Brooklyn. The artist’s sister-in-law Virginia is lounging in the hammock, as his wife feeds their first child, Alice or ‘Cosy’, in a highchair. Standing on the right is Chase’s sister Hattie, and at the left, asleep on the grass, is the family’s dog.

The Danish painter Laurits Andersen Ring’s wife Sigrid is the subject At Breakfast in 1898. She sits reading the ‘leftist’ daily newspaper Politiken in the sunshine. The artist had been an early subscriber to that paper when it first started to publish in 1884; it played an important role in the formation of the Social Liberal Party in Denmark, and remains one of the country’s leading ‘broadsheet’ papers.

Pierre Bonnard’s many domestic interiors include plenty of helpings of breakfast. In about 1899, he painted the muse and patron Misia Natanson at Breakfast, looking sultry, with one of her family’s maids at work in the background.

A couple of years later, fellow Nabi artist Maurice Denis painted the most patterned painting I have ever seen in his Breakfast, with its superb backdrop of the coast on a windy day.

Like Le Sidaner just a few years later, Pierre Bonnard painted laid-out tables as a form of still life. In 1908 these became more frequent, as in this Breakfast under the Arbour from 1908.

William McGregor Paxton, a great admirer of Vermeer who adopted the Dutch master’s optical techniques, seems to have painted The Breakfast in 1911 as a ‘problem picture’. As their maid walks out of the dining room, a young wife stares thoughtfully away from her husband, who is showing no interest in her at all, as he hides behind the pages of a broadsheet newspaper. You could cut the atmosphere here with a knife.

In Édouard Vuillard’s Reading in the Dining Room, Vaucresson from 1924, Lucy Hessel has already left her husband Jos reading the newspaper at the breakfast table, and gone to busy herself in the next room. Behind this mundane domestic scene is deeper complexity: Jos and Lucy Hessel were close friends of the artist, so close that at the time of this painting Vuillard – then in his mid-fifties – and Lucy were lovers.

In about 1930, when Pierre Bonnard painted his wife Marthe hunched up over the table at Breakfast, they had been married for just five of the thirty-seven years they had been living together. Although Bonnard’s many paintings of her nude hardly show any signs of her age, here she looks more as you might expect for a woman who had already turned sixty.

Bonnard also set the breakfast table into his best-developed framed external view, The Breakfast Room (Dining Room Overlooking the Garden) from 1930-31. This combines the still life of the laid table in the foreground, the powerful vertical framing of French windows, and the rich terrace landscape beyond. Ghostly repoussoir is provided by thin slivers of figures at the edges of his canvas.

Tomorrow I will turn to look at lunch.

After the breakfasts of yesterday’s article, we come on to lunch. Whereas the artist’s breakfast is often less about preparation for the day than postponing its start indefinitely, lunchtime is in the day’s midst, a meal taken between morning activities and those of the afternoon – which could range from social gossip to arduous work.

Walter Crane’s painting, which is in oils despite resembling a watercolour illustration, shows the Old Testament figures of Ruth and Boaz at the end of lunch, when Ruth was gleaning the fields owned and farmed by Boaz. Their dress is an odd composite of the Biblical and Arthurian. She is looking down at her hands, as if contemplating grain held in her left palm, while he has turned to look towards her. In the background Boaz’s paid employees continue with their harvest, saddled horses are idle, and a castellated house is set in the crag behind them.

In the same year, Édouard Manet painted what must be the best known lunch of them all, in his Luncheon on the Grass (1863). These two couples are apparently disinterested in the token picnic of fruit and bread which has spilled out from its basket in the left foreground. As the two men talk, fully dressed, a conspicuously naked woman stares unnervingly at the viewer, and the other woman is washing herself in the river behind. If they have indulged in any fruit, it is of the ‘forbidden’ kind.

For several other painters of the late nineteenth century, lunch was the time and place for their great figurative set pieces, such as Renoir’s masterpiece Luncheon of the Boating Party, on which he started work in the summer of 1880, completing it the following year.

This is set on the Île de Chatou at the Restaurant Fournaise. Among his models are his partner and later wife Aline Charigot (left foreground, with affenpinscher dog), the actress Jeanne Samary (upper right), and fellow artist Gustave Caillebotte (seated, lower right). This work was praised by several of the critics who saw it exhibited at the Seventh Impressionist Exhibition in 1882.

For other artists, lunch wasn’t an indulgent social occasion, but a snack taken in the midst of the working day. In the case of many Naturalist artists, that meant a simple rustic occasion.

Wilhelm Friedenberg’s undated The Goose Girl’s Lunch shows a younger girl, plainly dressed as a ‘peasant’ and barefoot, sat as she enjoys a short break with her lunch. A younger brother, who presumably brought the wicker basket out to her, is fast asleep at her side.

Laurits Andersen Ring was even more pointed in his social message in A Boy and a Girl Eating Lunch, from 1884. Paupers’ children, they have a single bowl of broth between them, and there’s not even a hint of wine and fruit. The girl looks up in tears, hoping for a miracle to change their lives, and take them away from this bare wooden table and blackened walls.

Naturalist artists painted both extremes. Now almost forgotten is Émile Friant’s masterpiece The Meurthe Boating Party, also known as Reunion of the Meurthe Boating Party or The Oarsmen of the Meurthe, from 1887. This shows the artist’s watersporting friends eating lunch together on the river Meurthe in Nancy.

This painting can be read as a broad message of well-being and conviviality: healthy, fit young men engaged in team sports; fraternity; and harmony across different classes within society. It was exhibited at the Salon in 1888, and as a result of its success there was featured as a full page in the popular magazine Le Monde Illustré, bringing Friant instant fame across the country.

The Belgian artist Émile Claus fell under the influence of the Impressionists, particularly Monet, Sisley, Renoir, and Pissarro, and came to appreciate the work of Anders Zorn and Le Sidaner. His painting of The Picnic from 1887 is set in the French/Belgian countryside around the River Lys, in the area of Ypres, which was devastated during the First World War. The plain clothing seen indicates that these figures are poor farmworkers.

The German painter of rustic scenes Friedrich Eckenfelder painted this Lunchbreak by the Cottage in 1888, which shows a small group of farmworkers sitting in the shade and eating lunch as their horses eat theirs.

There are still the occasional flights of fancy, like François Flameng’s undated Picnic. He returns to an earlier era, probably the eighteenth century, when the biggest question of the day is whether the servants brought the right wine.

Picnics were an occasional motif for Impressionist painters, notably this work by Renoir from about 1893, whose original French title is exactly the same as Manet’s earlier painting. Here Renoir explores the rich effects of dappled light, and details of the meal these three women, two children and a couple of dogs are sharing, are almost obscured.

In the late nineteenth century, the great Spanish artist Joaquín Sorolla had been an enthusiastic Naturalist. One of his last substantial works showing everyday poverty is Lunch on the Boat, painted in 1898. This shows a group of Valencian men and boys eating an improvised lunch under the awning on their fishing boat.

George Hendrik Breitner’s Lunch Break at the Building Site in the Van Diemenstraat in Amsterdam (1896-1900) shows a group of building workers sitting outside on a brighter day during their short lunchtime.

Pierre Bonnard seems to have had a liking for cats, which appear in several of his paintings, such as The Cats’ Lunch from about 1906. Two women are sat at the table, feeding their four cats. The women don’t look at the cats, nor at one another, but stare blankly into the space in front of them.

Finally, Albin Egger-Lienz painted this poignant image of agricultural workers eating their Lunch (The Soup II) in 1910. Five working men in a family have sat down together to eat a minimal meal of soup in the middle of the day, before returning to the fields. Each is armed with their own spoon, with which they feed from the single pot in the centre of the table.

Paintings of these two meals show how diverse art was in the nineteenth century, and reflect on its social concerns and stories. Unlike dinners and banquets, they include people of all classes, tables both flamboyant and frugal.

Art history books like to simplify: there was realism, then Impressionism, after which came Neo-Impressionism and Post-Impressionism before the arrival of Modernism in the twentieth century. In reality, of course, by 1919 you didn’t have to look far to see all of these, and sometimes in paintings hanging beside one another. In this second selection of paintings from a century ago, I show some landscapes from six famous artists across North America, Europe and Russia, and at least seventy years of -isms.

Starting with the most traditional style, Boris Kustodiev’s Maslenitsa (1919) shows this Eastern Slavic holiday. Maslenitsa (known in Russian as Ма́сленица, Ukrainian as Масниця, and Belarusian as Масьленіца) takes place during the last week before the start of the Eastern Orthodox Great Lent. If you want to celebrate that in 2020, it will take place between 24 February and 1 March, but as it is linked to Orthodox Easter (Pascha), the dates vary each year.

In the summer of 1919, the American artist and member of the Ashcan School George Bellows was in Middletown, Rhode Island, with his family. While he was there he painted Three Children (1919), which in 2007 was installed in the Green Room of the The White House. The three children shown are believed to be his two daughters and the son of a local farmer, although the painting is as much about the rich rolling countryside beyond them.

The Texan Impressionist Julian Onderdonk painted another of his famous bluebonnet landscapes, Early Spring — Bluebonnets and Mesquite (1919), which is a very painterly sketch made when the weather was most suitable for plein air painting.

The Belgian Neo-Impressionist Théo van Rysselberghe had abandoned ‘Pointillism’ in 1910, and the following year retired to paint in the South of France. His colours became intense, as shown in his Large Tree near the Sea (1919), in which his marks have also become much less regular.

One of the most prolific landscape painters of 1919 was Lovis Corinth, who is seldom thought of in this context. In the summer of 1918, Corinth and his family had first visited Urfeld, on the shore of Walchensee (Lake Walchen), to the south of Munich. They fell in love with the countryside there, and the following year bought some land on which Charlotte arranged for a simple chalet to be built. In the coming years, the Walchensee was to prove Corinth’s salvation, and the motif for at least sixty superb landscape paintings.

In September of 1919, their new chalet was ready, and the Corinths moved in to watch the onset of autumn. Walchensee, Blue Landscape (1919) was probably painted quite early, before the first substantial fall of snow.

October Snow at Walchensee (1919) shows an initial gentle touch of snow as autumn becomes properly established.

Later in the season, when the ground was well-covered with snow, Corinth painted it in Walchensee, Snowscape (1919).

My final painting in this selection comes from the eclectic and versatile American Joseph Stella, who was associated with both Precisionism and Futurism. His paintings of smoky factories and the Brooklyn Bridge from 1919-20 are justifiably well-known.

In 1919, he was starting to move away from these industrial landscapes, and painted Nocturne II in pastels. Here it is the trees which are dark and shadowy, lending quite a sinister air to this nighttime view of a building.

The richness of reality may be much messier than theory, but it’s the more wonderful for that variety, don’t you think?